Wireless System And SystemC-AMS Basic Infrastructure – WASABI

Today, System-on-chip (SoC) and System-in-package (SiP) become more and more complex and include not only digital blocks but also analogue parts, radio frequency (RF) communication capabilities as well as sensor/actuators. This is due to advances in semiconductor technology and the market demands to add application-specification components such as image sensors and RF components inside chips. Therefore designers have to face both the acceleration of the market and the silicon process roadmap. Unfortunately a complete design flow, starting at system level with functional specifications till automatic layout generation is not available for a SoC mixing heterogeneous physical domains. If reliable design flows are available for purely digital chips, many elements of this flow are lacking for analogue or RF parts. Nowadays, each of these blocks of the design is independently simulated / verified using relevant dedicated tools, but not its integration inside the whole system. This prevents detecting design errors before fabrication resulting in a very costly redesign loop and may impact the application itself. Hence the challenge of this project is to model the whole system with a single hardware description language and to simulate it in the same environment.

In this project, we intend to provide a method, together with a design environment, based on SystemC and SystemC-AMS capabilities, to perform modelling and simulation of complex heterogeneous (AMS and RF) SoCs and validate this approach with an industrial application : a Wireless Video System (WVS). This application combines a high dynamic range video sensor, an analog-to-digital converter, a RF transceiver at 60Ghz together with a general purpose 32-bit processor.

As results of this project, System-C and System-C/AMS models for the various parts of the SoC will be provided. The level of abstraction will be adapted to support the simulation of the complete system including the operating system and the application software layers. In order to formalize the abstraction of analog and RF IPs, we will establish a list of candidate extensions of the IP-XACT schema and propose it to the SPIRIT Consortium. This will enable us to provide a new framework, whose functionalities will be dedicated to the design, simulation and performance optimization of AMS systems, as an extension of the commercial existing environment currently dedicated to digital systems and whose structure is based on the exploitation of SPIRIT IP-XACT.

This framework will be used to perform design space exploration of the whole system by varying each block specification and analyzing the system performance and investigating the accuracy/simulation-time efficiency. Up to 40 SoCs exchanging video information through RF links will be considered.

In the WASABI project, two academic partners (IEMN, UPMC) and two industrial partners (STMicroelectronics and MDS) will share their complementary knowledge to handle the challenge of modelling and simulation of a complete AMS SoC.