Towards a common hardware/software specification and implementation approach for distributed, rel time and embedded systems, based on middlewares and object-oriented components
Grégory Gailliard · HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) · 2010
This thesis deals with the hardware application of the software concepts of middleware and software architecture based on components, containers and connectors within Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). The target application domain is Software Defined Radio (SDR) compliant with the Software Communications Architecture (SCA). With the SCA, software radio applications are broken into functional waveform components to be deployed on heterogeneous and distributed hardware/software radio platforms. These components provide and require abstract software interfaces described using operation signatures in the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and/or the Interface Definition Language (IDL) of the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) middleware, both standardized by an international software industry consortium called Object management Group (OMG). The portability and reusability needs of these business components require that their abstract interfaces defined at a system level are independent of a software or hardware implementation and can be indifferently translated into a software programming language like C/C++, a system language like SystemC at transaction level (Transaction Level Modeling - TLM), or a hardware description language like VHDL or SystemC at Register Transfer Level (RTL). The interoperability need of SDR components requires transparent communications regardless of their hardware/software implementation and their distribution. These first needs were addressed by formalizing mapping rules between abstract components in OMG IDL3 or UML2, signal based hardware components described in VHDL or SystemC RTL, and system components in SystemC TLM. The second requirement was addressed by prototyping a hardware middleware using transparently memory mapping and two message protocols: CORBA General Inter Object Request Broker Protocol (GIOP) and SCA Modem Hardware Abstraction layer (MHAL).