Aspect-Oriented Design Automation with Model Transformation
Han Zhao, Deyan Wang, Gabriel Rutsch, Bowen Li, Sebastian Siegfried Prebeck, Daniela Sánchez Lopera, Keerthikumara Devarajegowda, Wolfgang Ecker · 2021
Despite the high configurability of IPs and hardware generators, code modifications are still required to introduce aspect-oriented instrumentation to satisfy emerging design requirements such as on-chip debug and functional safety. These code modifications lead to escalated development, verification efforts and deteriorate the code reuse. This paper proposes a highly efficient aspect-oriented design automation approach that leverages graph-grammar-based model transformations. With the proposed approach, main design functionalities and aspect-oriented instrumentation are separately developed, automatically integrated and verified. To demonstrate the applicability, industrial SoCs were transformed to support on-chip debug. Experimental results confirm the efficiency of the approach. Further, reduced code is needed with the proposed automation approach, which also replaces the error-prone manual RTL coding. Finally, the transformation scripts are applicable to different SoCs, which promotes the overall code reuse.