A formal method for hardware IP design and integration under I/O and timing constraints

Abstract

IP integration, which is one of the most important SoC design steps, requires taking into account communication and timing constraints. In that context, design and reuse can be improved using IP cores described at a high abstraction level. In this paper, we present an IP design approach that relies on three main phases: (1) constraint modeling, (2) IP constraint analysis steps for feasibility checking, and (3) synthesis. We propose a set of techniques dedicated to the digital signal processing domain that lead to an optimized IP core integration. Based on a generic architecture of components, the method we propose provides automatic generation of IP cores designed under integration constraints. We show the effectiveness of our approach with a DCT core design case study.