The metamodeling approach to system level synthesis
Wolfgang Ecker, Michael Velten, Leily Zafari, Ajay K. Goyal · 2014
This paper presents an industry proven Metamodeling based approach to System-Level-Synthesis which is seen as generic design automation strategy above today's implementation levels RTL (for digital) and Schematic Entry (for analog). The approach follows a new synthesis paradigm: The designer develops a simple domain and/or design specific language and a smart tool synthesizing implementation level models according to its needs. The overhead of making both a tool and a model pays off since the tool building is automated by code generation and reuse, both based on Metamodeling techniques. Also the focus on owns demand keeps development costs low. Finally, specification data is utilized. I.e. the domain specific language simplifies to a document structure as a table. This keeps also modeling effort low since specification content is used and no model need to be built. Furthermore, increases design consistency and thus decreases debug time. Using these concepts, single design steps have been speed up to a factor of 20x and implementations of chips (specification-to-tapeout) have been speed up to a factor of 3x.