OCP Adoption 

Summit Design's SystemC-based ESL Solutions for SoC Design Strengthened by OCP Standard 

By Rami Rachamim, Director of Marketing, Summit Design

Summit Design is the electronic design automation (EDA) company that pioneered high-level design automation (HLDA) and leads the field of electronic system-level design (ESL). Summit tools and methodologies are being used in applications such as SAN and Networking, Automotive, Consumer Electronics and Military/Aerospace. Based upon SystemC and ESL technologies, Summit Design targets high-end SoC design with a leading platform for modeling and verification of these complex systems chips. The vision and value offered by ESL is strengthened significantly through the use of standards that maintain interoperability and continuity down to implementation. As such, it is OCP-IP that provides the foremost standards needed for a high-level design flow. OCP standardizes the communication model and infrastructure in an SoC design. It also allows engineers to run architectural analysis and functional verification on an implementation neutral bus model that then can be targeted to the desired architecture.

The OCP standard frees designers from needing to figure out how to implement interface protocols and then test the implementation. Instead, it lets designers virtually “plug and play,” trying out different processors, bus architectures and peripherals. Having a standard way to model inner-bus communication and the SoC backbone across processors and IP blocks substantially drives IP reuse, allowing engineers to explore various high-level communication models and bus architectures within a structured, well-defined flow to implementation.

This complete socket standard helps SoC designers avoid the usual struggles they face in building a system that can include one or more processors from one or more vendors, various external IP from different sources, and custom IP, such as a signal processor or graphic accelerator engines. The first challenge is to link these blocks together, regardless of their origin, language or abstraction level. Then designers need to make sure they can run the system with software (boot code, firmware, etc.) and verify it—given all its complexity—with acceptable performance.

In order to meet these challenges, engineers must adopt a different methodology and design techniques, and also standardize an infrastructure for all IP and processor providers. Both aspects are critical and mutually dependent. On the methodology side, ESL and SystemC have the promise to provide the needed abstraction and performance that can carry future complexity and design challenges. Traditional RTL is not adequate for supporting high-level modeling and verification of increasingly complex SoCs. Detecting malfunctioning components or under-designed bandwidth of silicon resources during RTL verification can be very costly and time consuming. This is especially true when, in the worst case, faults are detected only after tape-out or production.

Summit’s Visual Elite ESC™ solution, which provides high-performance system modeling and a verification platform for target processors, now has a unified communication interface, OCP, that can be shared across the various architectures.

In order to drive ESL methodology, semiconductor and IP providers must support the emerging standards and provide the needed modeling infrastructure. OCP makes this possible. It allows IP providers to unify the way they model and distribute their IP. It lets EDA companies build design platforms around them. And, it enables designers and system architects to structure efficient, scalable SoCs. Customers can create and integrate interoperable virtual components quickly, simply by connecting their bus, processor and peripheral through the OCP standard channel, no matter what on-chip architecture they’re using.

At Summit, we see OCP as the standard socket for SoC design that is readily usable and from which everyone can derive valuable benefits.

For more information about Summit, visit www.summit-design.com.


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