DESIGN OF DISTRIBUTED GENERIC EMBEDDED COMPONENTS

Abstract

The increasingly complex nature of embedded system design is forcing designers to jointly use the available resources, both CAD tools and IP componentry, which are distributed between different design teams. We argue that the existing collaborative design practices demand that the abstraction level in design must be raised above the traditional soft IP. Markup languages can be used to structure and hierarchically organize the domain content. Such structuring makes the representation, processing, and distribution of a domain content much easier. This paper proposes to adopt XML for representation, parameterization, modification and distribution of embedded components. The XML-based representation of soft IPs can be considered as the next generation of IP - distributed generic embedded components (DGECs). We discuss their features, design problems and propose a design framework.