A Generic IP-XACT Generator for Configurable Intellectual Property

Abstract

As chip design became more and more complex and concept of reusable hardware de- sign (Intellectual property) evolved. IP-XACT IEEE P 1685 standard was developed for integrating and reusing Intellectual property within tool ows. IP-XACT IEEE P1685 is a xml based standard for capturing metadata of a design (HDL code).It only captures the metadata that is relevant to integration not the underlying functionality of the design. Assembly tools which are based on IP-XACT read these metadata to integrate IP's. Hardware de nition languages can contain various design con gura- tions in a single design based on macro de nition .These macros values de ne the actual the con guration of design that is actually synthesized. IP-XACT currently has this limitation that it can only capture one hardware con guration at a time. So for a con gurable design designer has to manually create di erent metadata for di erent con guration manually. In this report we present a methodology to extend the standard to support con gurable Intellectual Property. Proposed methodology is such that it can be integrated into the existing assembly tools without making additional changes to the tool. The proposed methodology is assembly tool independent, which is acheaved by making communication between assembly tool and con guring mechanism standardized by using TGI API's and SOAP protocol. Methodology provides a mechanism to append con gurability information into the metadata and a mechanism to generate a particular con guration. This report presents an implementation for the methodology and a deployment model. Integration and use model with di erent assembly tool is presented.