Exploring system interconnection architectures with VIPACES: From direct connections to NoCs

Abstract

This paper presents a simple environment for the verification of AMBA 3 AXI systems in Verification IP (VIP) production called VIPACES (Verification Interface Primitives for the development of AXI Compliant Elements and Systems). These primitives are presented as a not compiled library written in SystemC where interfaces are the core of the library. The definition of interfaces instead of generic modules let the user construct custom modules improving the resources spent during the verification phase as well as easily adapting his modules to the AMBA 3 AXI protocol. This topic is the main discussion in the VIPACES library. The paper focuses on comparing and contrasting the main interconnection schemes for ANWA 3 AXI as modeled by VIPACES. For assessing these results we propose a validation scenario with a particular architecture belonging to the domain of MPEG4 video decoding,. which is compound by an AXI bus connecting an IDCT and other processing resources.