Increasing Design Productivity through Core Reuse, Meta-data Encapsulation, and Synthesis

This paper presents a novel IP core reuse strategy which reduces design time from days to hours for communication circuits such as digital radio receivers. This design productivity is obtained by leveraging a highly parameterized library of communication specific cores. These cores are described in IP-XACT XML with vendor extensions describing the timing behavior of their communication interfaces. A synthesis tool, called Ogre, was created that generates the communication interfaces between cores described in IP-XACT and synthesizes full designs from structural synchronous dataflow specifications. Design productivity improvements are demonstrated with several radio receiver designs.