Incorporating cores into system-level specification
Frank Vahid, Tony D. Givargis · 1998
We describe an approach for incorporating cores into a system-level specification. The goal is to allow a designer to specify both custom behavior and pre-designed cores at the earliest design stages, and to refine both into implementations in a unified manner. The approach is based on experience with an actual application of a GPSbased navigation system. We use an object-oriented language for specification, representing each core as an object. We define three specification levels, and we evaluate the appropriateness of existing inter-object communication methods for cores. The approach forms the specification basis for the Dalton project. 1 Introduction Increasing chip capacities has led to entire systems being implemented on a single chip. Pre-designed system components like bus controllers and data encoders, which previously took the form of integrated circuits (IC's), are now becoming available instead as intellectual property cores so that they may be incorporated onto a single ...