Hardware-accelerated software library drivers generation for IP-centric SoC designs

Abstract

In recent years, the semiconductor industry has been witnessing an increasing reuse of hardware IPs for System-on-Chip (SoC) designs and embedded computing systems on FPGA platforms with hard-core processors. The IP-reuse comes with an increasing complexity at the hardware-software (HW-SW) interface. The efforts required to access the HW through the increasingly complex HW-SW interface diminishes the potential IP-reuse productivity gain. In our work, we are proposing hierarchical drivers for accessing IP-subsystems and its generation for enabling easier SW application adaptation to HW-changes and faster design space exploration (DSE) on a targeted HW-accelerated SW libraries. At the lowest level, closest to the HW, is the hardware abstraction layer (HAL), these are the platform-specific register-access drivers. At the next layer are the drivers to access the registers and bit-fields of each IP component of the IP-library. Next are the IP-subsystems drivers. At the top-layer, closest to the SW, is the simple scheduler with SW interface library that provides access functions to the SW application. The drivers generator uses the HW knowledge of IPs and IP-subsystems encoded in IP-XACT for generating the drivers for both operating system (OS) and non-OS based applications. For the OS-based applications, user-space drivers are generated, as well as device tree source (DTS) and drivers mapping in the kernel-space. In a case study, we have validated our methodology while performing DSE for a video processing application targeted to an IP-library, both as non-OS and with OS on Xilinx Zynq-based FPGA.