Study On The System C Based ASIC Design Method

The explosive growth in silicon capacity and the consumer use of electronic products have introduced many new challenges for the ASIC design methodology. But the current methodologies for IC design which base on RTL synthesis are inadequate for the market requirement. The major technical barriers are contributed by two factors: first, very high integration and the increasing complexity of digital integrated circuits. The methodology and EDA tools should adopt this change. Moreover, with characteristic wire width decrease, the delay of wire has dominated the chip's overall delay, and exacerbates the interconnect management weakness of the complexity. The design method should transfer from logic-oriented design to interconnection-oriented design because of DSM effects. We now should consider physical effects at the early stage of the design. This needs new methods and tools to modeling function and structure simultaneously and give early estimating of physical performance. SystemC library makes the use of the C++ language for system design possible. A SystemC-based hardware methodology places both hardware and software in the same language. This simplifies software verification, which is typically one of the critical bottlenecks in a product release.SystemC provide the notions of describing hardware such as module, signal, port,multi-value signal,fix point value and so on. A cycle-based simulation kernel is also provided. Further more, SystemC introduces a set of new notions for modeling of communication. They are channel, interface and event. With these notions, designer can separate computation from communication and improve the reusability of the design.However, SystemC-based design methodology is far from mature. Designers use SystemC the same way they use HDLs. How to use characters of C++ to improve the management of design complexity and the design reuse is still an open issue.The purpose of this dissertation was to conduct a research on SystemC-based design method and design-reuse method under the C/C++ hardware design.The primary contributions in this dissertation follow:1) The conceptions of package, inheritance, polymorphs, pattern and framework in object-oriented technique are very useful for microelectronic SOC modeling. I present a solution for mapping function pointer and virtual function into hardware. Based on this solution, I present how to use polymorphs, pattern and framework in hardware design.2) The verification method based on profiling and assertion techniques is built. The C++ library of assertions is developed to improve the verification of SystemC models.3) Physical design predictability is a key issue in SOC design. Floorplan-centric design methodology can alleviate the timing converge problems. We extended the SystemC class structure to capture physical structure and implement the anneal-based floorplan algorithm in SystemC. The PDL allows architecture-function codesign.4) We designed an ARM instruction compatible pipeline based on SystemC to verify the SystemC-based design methodology. We also give a method for communication refinement.