Section: New Results

Model-Based approaches to SoC design

Participants : Charles André, Robert de Simone, Benoît Ferrero, Carlos Gomez Cardenas, Jean-François Le Tallec.

The main practical goal of this work was to combine in a sensible way the various formalisms SystemC, IP-XACT, UML MARTE, and UPF (for power consumption representation) (see 4.1 for further descriptions). There were true motivations for this: SystemC is a de-facto standard for SoC simulation at various levels, but currently lacks any sort of formal description so that systems can be analysed, reasoned about for correctness and optimized (and it becomes even more so with newer draft standard evolutions). IP-XACT was introduced as an ADL to ease composition and assembly of IP components (written in SystemC or not), but again it currently fails short of its goal, and in particular does not allow standard decoration of model attributes in prominent non-functional domains such as timing/performance and low-power/energy consumption. These could be provided with the help of dedicated features in UML MARTE, and aligned on the UPF standard for power management modeling.

While the intended design flow would take the UML MARTE and UPF to IP-XACT to SystemC direction, it was important to extract IP-XACT and MARTE structural representation from existing SystemC programs, both to populate the flow with existing legacy models, and to explore better the requirements for complete and consistent modeling towards IP block assembly. This work was conducted in Jean-François Le Tallec PhD, to be defended in January 2012 [16] . Together with Benoît Ferrero he defined and realized a software tool named SCiPX (SystemC to IP-XACT translator), originally based on the PinaVM tool by VERIMAG and the DoxyGen syntactic analyzer.

SCiPX is available in prototype version from our site http://www-sop.inria.fr/aoste/index.php?page=software/scipx . It can be combined with the former software transformation modules IPXACT2Marte and Marte2IPXACT developed previously. These results were partly supported by the ID/TL-M contract wih ST Microelectronics (see 7.1 ), and the ANR HeLP project (see 8.2.2 ), and were presented in [26] , [25]

As part of his PhD thesis, Carlos Gomez Cardenas described a subset of UPF standard as a metamodel inside UML MARTE. He also considered compatibility and interconnections with the industrial environments AcePlorer (by Docea Power), and Synopsys Virtualizer (formerly CoWare), provided to us in the context of the CIM PACA tool farm 8.1.1 . Preliminary results were presented in [36] . This work was also presented during internal meetings of the ANR HeLP project, and coordinated with work conducted in the team of Michel Auguin at CNRS UMR LEAT (also in Sophia-Antipolis).