Applying IP-XACT in product data management
Erno Salminen, Timo D. Hämäläinen, Marko Hännikäinen · 2011
Key challenge for industrial embedded system companies is product data management (PMD) of rapidly changing requirements, new platforms and own legacy intellectual property. This can be alleviated with IP component reuse methods, platform based design, and Model Driven Development (MDD) methodologies. We propose an open source product integration environment suitable for small and mid-size enterprises (SME) utilizing FPGAs. We extend the use of IP-XACT standard from HW integration at IP-level to board and chip level designs, describe SW as IP-XACT metadata objects, and add reusability status to objects for PDM. We do not modify or extend IP-XACT metadata format to maintain compatibility with standard compliant tools. Instead, we propose naming conventions and usage profiles. An exemplar FPGA-product shows feasibility in practice in our Kactus2 tool. The benefits are covering complete products including SW objects and HW/SW mappings while strictly keeping the standard XML format.