KR100552668B1 - Method for Synthesizing Hardware-Software interface - Google Patents

Abstract

The present invention provides a simple and more efficient interface synthesis method for automatically generating a software device driver and a hardware interface circuit for the interface between a hardware module and a software module on an ARM / AMBA-based target disk. According to one aspect, in a hybrid design of a processor-integrated system in which hardware-software is mixed using a target disk based on an ARM processor / AMBA chipset, a hardware module and software in a synthesis method of interfacing a software module and a hardware module to each other Receiving interface information of the module; Determining a control signal related to transmission and reception between a hardware module and a software module according to the interface information; Allocating a physical address corresponding to the interface information according to the determined control signal; Automatically generating a hardware interface file that is responsible for the interface of the hardware module; And automatically generating a software interface driver that is responsible for the interface of the software module.

Interface, driver, on-chip, hardware, software

Description

Method for Synthesizing Hardware-Software interface             

1 illustrates an integrated environment of a processor embedded hardware-software hybrid design.

2A is a conceptual diagram illustrating a hardware-software interface synthesizer for automatically generating a hardware-software interface according to the present invention.

Figure 2b illustrates in more detail the concept of a hardware-software interface synthesizer in accordance with the present invention.

Figure 3a is a flow chart illustrating a method for synthesizing an interface between hardware and software modules according to the present invention.

FIG. 3B is a detailed flowchart of hardware interface generation in FIG. 3A. FIG.

FIG. 3C is a detailed flowchart of software interface driver generation in FIG. 3A. FIG.

4 illustrates a channel used to implement the hardware-software interface synthesis method according to the present invention.

FIG. 5 is a diagram illustrating an operation of storing data from a hardware module to a software module during an operation between a hardware interface file and a software interface driver generated by the hardware-software interface synthesizer according to the present invention. FIG.

FIG. 6 is a diagram illustrating an operation of storing data from a software module to a hardware module during an operation between a hardware interface file and a software interface driver generated by the hardware-software interface synthesizer according to the present invention. FIG.

7 is a view showing an operation of receiving data of a module of hardware from a software module during an operation between a hardware interface file and a software interface driver generated by the hardware-software interface synthesizer according to the present invention.

The present invention relates to a method for synthesizing an interface for data communication between a hardware module and a software module, and in particular, to automatically generate a hardware interface file that is responsible for the interface of the hardware module and a software module driver for the interface of the software module. It relates to a hardware-software interface synthesis method.

To this end, the hardware-software interface of the present invention is an AMBA (Advanced) having an ARM7TDMI, which is a low-power 32-bit microprocessor used in information terminals, multimedia devices, and IC cards, and an on-chip bus structure. In the target disk, which consists of a microprocessor bus architecture (Chipset) chip, it reduces the burden of data communication between hardware and software modules to automatically generate hardware and software interface modules that meet the performance of the entire system.

Recently, as the complexity of digital systems has increased and various system design technologies have emerged, attention has been focused on mixed designs that enable efficient and fast design by simultaneously designing hardware and software. The combination of hardware and software is used in most electronic systems, including computer-controlled communication devices, multimedia devices, and information device terminals. There is a need for techniques for designing mixed systems.

Recent advances in process technology have led to a significant increase in the number of devices that can be integrated on a single chip, enabling the design of a system on a chip (SOC) system. As a result, the complexity of the design to be implemented is increasing greatly, but as the time to market of products is getting shorter and shorter, the codesign that enables efficient and fast design by designing the hardware and software constituting the system at the same time (codesign) ) Is growing in interest.

The conventional system design methodology is divided into hardware and software at the beginning of development based on the experience of the system expert after the specification is determined, and each part is designed by different designers and finally the parts are integrated. In this conventional design method, in most cases, the software development is possible only after the hardware prototype is completed, and the design period becomes longer. In this case, even if a hardware design mismatch is found during the software development process, the hardware Fixing it becomes very difficult.

Another fundamental problem with this conventional design method is that it is difficult to obtain an optimal partition for the purpose of the design because it relies solely on the designer's experience in dividing the system's functions into hardware and software. There are situations where parts can be implemented in hardware, increasing the price of the system, or too many parts in software, not meeting the required performance.

In this case, the increase in design time and cost of the redesign may eventually lead to competition. The only solution to this problem is the introduction of a design methodology that can design hardware and software simultaneously.

Hardware / software codesign is a system design method for systematically designing an embedded processor-specific application specific integrated circuit (AISC). It is designed to consider the hardware and software of the system ASIC at the same time, thereby improving the design productivity of the embedded processor ASIC. And improves quality. While conventional ASIC designs start at the register transfer level, there is a big difference in mixed designs that the ASIC design starts at the system level.

By increasing the abstraction level of the design from the register transfer level to the system level, the design productivity can be increased. Briefly describing the mixed design process, (1) using the system description language to describe the operation of the system at the system level and verifying system specifications with system simulation, and (2) dividing the system into hardware and software parts. Step (3) synthesizing hardware elements into high-level synthesis and logical synthesis, (4) generating software elements into code to be run on embedded microprocessors through software synthesizers and compilers, and (5) system integration Each element can be summarized into steps that verify the behavior of the system through mixed simulation or hardware prototype implementation.

The key to a hybrid design is to automate all of the designer's previous processes (system partitioning, system integration, system verification, etc.) to explore many design possibilities in a short time to find optimal solutions and minimize system integration errors. There is. To this end, it is essential to develop a computer-aided design (CAD) system for a processor-integrated ASIC hybrid design.

1 is a diagram illustrating an integrated environment of a mixed design of hardware software using an ARM / AMBA-based target disk. Hereinafter, an integrated environment of a mixed design of hardware software will be described with reference to FIG. 1.

First, the microprocessor used in the target disk is an ARM7TDMI microcomputer, a microcomputer of ARM's Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC) structure, which has a 16-bit instruction and a 32-bit data processing function. have.

In a mixed design of a hardware-software mixed processor embedded system, the process of creating the interface required for the communication of data and control signals between divided heterogeneous system modules, that is, hardware and software modules, can be time consuming and error prone. That's the job you need. Therefore, hardware-software interface design is an essential part of a mixed design environment and is a very important step that not only has a big impact on the performance of the system but also has a great influence on the success of the final design result. In addition, the hardware software interface design may vary depending on the configuration of the target disc.

In the conventional method, the RPC (Remote Port) is a direct port I / O method and an interface protocol that connects a first in first out (FIFO) to a pointer-to-point channel for a hardware-software interface channel. The interface was performed using -Procedure-Call.

This interface synthesis method has a limited number of ports because it uses the direct port I / O method, and because the hardware and software designers require expert knowledge of the interface because of the complex RPC protocol, there is an error in creating the interface. Has a lot of disadvantages and takes a lot of time.

In other words, I / O scenarios are pre-defined to build a library, and then the interface signals and addresses are repeatedly refined until a perfect interface is performed according to the target disk. It has a limitation using the method.

It is an object of the present invention to provide a hardware-software interface synthesis method for automatically generating a software device driver and a hardware interface circuit for an interface of a hardware module and a software module.

According to an aspect of the present invention for achieving the above object, in a mixed design of a processor-embedded system in which hardware-software is mixed using a target disk based on an ARM processor / AMBA chipset, a software module and a hardware module interface with each other. A synthesis method, comprising: receiving interface information between a hardware module and a software module; Determining a control signal related to transmission and reception between a hardware module and a software module according to the interface information; Allocating a physical address corresponding to the interface information according to the determined control signal; Automatically generating a hardware interface file that is responsible for the interface of the hardware module; And automatically generating a software interface driver that is responsible for the interface of the software module.

The hardware-software interface synthesis method proposed in the present invention uses a bus channel provided by AMBA (Advanced Microprocessor Bus Architecture) as a channel for interface between hardware and software modules, and an interrupt method is used as a protocol for synchronization between interface data. . Although it is a method applied to a limited version of ARM / AMBA-based target version, hardware and software interface modules can be automatically generated, compared to the conventional method of manually working, so that a more efficient system can be implemented.

In addition, the feature of the hardware-software interface synthesis method of the present invention is a protocol for interface synchronization, which uses a faster interrupt synchronization technique than a conventional interface protocol, and uses a memory map method to solve the limitation of the number of ports. By using Send / Receive function provided, interface between hardware module and software module is simple and efficient.

In addition, the feature of the hardware-software interface synthesis method of the present invention is to automatically interface by inputting only the direction of the interface, the size of the data type data, and the address in order to solve the process of repeatedly modifying the predefined I / O scenario. To create a module.

In other words, the hardware-software interface synthesis method is a device driver and a hardware interface by inputting interface information of a hardware module written in a VHDL (Very High Speed Integrated Circuit Hardware Description Language) and a software module written in a C program. Create a circuit. This is then immediately applied to the target disk to verify the correctness of the motion through the mixed simulation.

DETAILED DESCRIPTION Hereinafter, exemplary embodiments of the present invention will be described in detail with reference to the accompanying drawings so that those skilled in the art may easily implement the technical idea of the present invention. do.

2A is a conceptual diagram illustrating a synthesizer for automatically generating a hardware-software module interface according to the present invention.

Referring to FIG. 2A, the interface portion of the hardware-software module, which was previously manually implemented, is automatically implemented by the hardware-software interface synthesizer according to the present invention.

Figure 2b is a view showing in more detail the concept of the interface generator in the target disk based on the ARM / AMBA in accordance with the present invention.

Referring to Figure 2b, for the data interface of the hardware-software module to be applied to the target disk composed of ARM7TDMI and Advanced Microprocessor Bus Architecture (AMBA) having an on-chip bus structure, The hardware interface circuit responsible for the interface and the software driver responsible for the software interface are automatically implemented by the hardware-software interface generator.

In detail, the interface between the software and the hardware does not require a separate interface circuit when implemented with the same communication protocol, but otherwise, an interface module must be synthesized and inserted therebetween. The interface of the hardware-software module is executed by the software but communicates using the interface of the microprocessor. The hardware part automatically generates and inserts the interface module for communication with the microprocessor and the device part creates the device driver to solve the problem. .

3A is a flow diagram of creating an interface synthesizer of a hardware-software module. Referring to FIG. 3A, the system is initially initialized to the ARM / AMBA target disk (100), and the respective signal information is received from the hardware-software module. (200) Then, an internal control signal is generated (300). A physical address is assigned to each interface signal (400). Next, a hardware interface circuit is generated (500), and a software driver is generated (600).

FIG. 3B is a detailed flowchart of generating the hardware interface 500 in FIG. 3A.

Referring to FIG. 3B, the hardware interface 500 selects a transmit / receive signal communicating with a software module in a hardware module (510), sets a register for transmission and reception, and stores the signal and data of the hardware module (520). Determining a memory mapped I / O for the transmitted / received signal (530), generating a hardware interrupt (540), and then waiting for a response from the software module (550); If so, the step 560 is passed to the hardware module.

FIG. 3C is a detailed flowchart of creating a software interface driver in FIG. 3A.

Referring to FIG. 3C, the software interface driver 600 selects a variable to be transmitted / received with a hardware module 610, determines a common storage space for the variable 620, and generates an interrupt 630. Operating the service routine of the generated interrupt (640), transferring the necessary signal after the interrupt recognition to the software module (650), performing the necessary operation on the software module (660), and performing a predetermined variable. The transfer is made to the hardware through step 670.

4 shows a channel used to implement the hardware-software interface synthesis method according to the invention in an ARM / AMBA object disc;

Referring to FIG. 4, a communication interface channel between hardware and software modules may use a dedicated port as shown in (1), a FIFO as shown in (2), and a memory map as shown in (3). Here, the method of using a dedicated port is a method of using a dedicated port between different modules by using a point-to-point connection as in (1), but in this case, the number of dedicated ports may be limited. .

In this case, the memory map is used to allocate a specific address in the memory address space and communicate using the address bus and the data bus through the allocated address. This can solve the problem of a separate port allocation algorithm.

Hereinafter, a hardware-software interface synthesis method will be described with reference to 3a to 4.

First, an interface protocol is required for synchronization of transmission / reception data between a hardware module and a software module provided by the ARM / AMBA object disc.

Interface protocols include message transfer, shared memory, and interrupt synchronization depending on design constraints. As described above, in the ARM / AMBA-based target edition, since the interrupt is possible and the interface protocol is faster than other methods, the synchronization scheme based on the interrupt is used as the protocol.

The following describes the synchronization method by interrupt applied in the ARM / AMBA-based target version. Load data from the hardware module to the bus. The hardware module passes the interrupt signal to the microprocessor. The microprocessor receives the interrupt signal and sends an interrupt signal to the software module. The software module recognizes the interrupt signal, calls the interrupt service routine defined by the interrupt vector, processes the data, and loads the data into the specified memory space. The software module then sends an end signal of the interrupt service routine to the microprocessor. When the microprocessor sends an interrupt termination signal to the hardware module, the hardware module reads the resulting data from the given memory space and handles the next task.

On the other hand, the hardware-software interface synthesizer is a program written in C and inputs a software module C and a VHDL file, which is a hardware module, as a program, and automatically generates a device driver written in the software interface module C and an interface file written in VHDL. We also use the Send / Receive function in the interface synthesizer to implement the interface channel and protocol.

The interface synthesizer reads the interface table used by the interface module and generates internal signals for the interface. In this case, the interface information used is input / output signal, data size, data direction (HW-> SW, SW-> HW), data type, signal operation code, memory address assigned to the signal, actual value to be transmitted, etc. It includes. For the simple interface method, we use Send / Receive function to allocate the memory map required for the interface and send and receive data through the allocated memory map. For example, the Send and Receive functions have the following form:

Send (addr, data_type, data_size, data, direction)

Receive (addr, data_type, data_size, data, direction)

5 to 7 are views illustrating a process of interfacing hardware and software modules by a Send / Receive function.

FIG. 5 is an operation of writing data from the hardware module 400 to the software module 100. The hardware module 400 sends data and a request signal 2 to the hardware interface circuit 300. . Subsequently, the interface circuit 300 requests the interrupt signal 3 to the driver 200 of the software module 200, and the driver 200 sends a read confirmation signal READ SIGNAL ID, 4) and import the data to the driver 200 (5).

Subsequently, the software driver 200 transmits the data 6 and the set flag signal 7 to the software module 100. The software driver 200 then transmits a JOB END signal 8, which is a completion signal, to the interface circuit 300, and the interface circuit sends an acknowledgment signal 9 to the hardware module.

6 illustrates an operation of storing data from the software module 100 to the hardware module 400. First, the software driver 100 receives the data 1 and the request (REQ) signal 2 from the software module 100 and stores the data in the hardware interface circuit 300 (WRITE) (3). In this case, the above-described Send function is used.

The interface circuit 300 then sends data to the hardware module 400 with the request (REQ) signal 5 and the hardware module receiving the data sends an acknowledgment (ACK) signal 6 to the hardware interface circuit 300.

FIG. 7 is a diagram in which the software module 100 sends a read request signal 1 to the hardware interface circuit 300 through the software driver 200 using the above-described Receive function. Subsequently, the hard air interface circuit 300 sends a request (REQ) signal 3 to the hardware module 400, and the hardware module 400 sends data 5 and an acknowledgment signal 4 to the hardware interface circuit 300. send. The software driver 200 then sends the data 7 to the software module 100 using the Receive function described above. The above operation uses the operation protocol implemented by the Send / Receive function, which operates on the AMBA Bus structure.

Although the technical spirit of the present invention has been described in detail according to the above preferred embodiment, it should be noted that the above-described embodiment is for the purpose of description and not of limitation. In addition, those skilled in the art will understand that various embodiments are possible within the scope of the technical idea of the present invention.

In the integrated environment in which the hardware driver and hardware interface circuits are automatically generated in the ARM / AMBA-based target disk by the hardware-software interface synthesis method according to the present invention, the hardware driver and the hardware interface circuit are automatically designed together. Make your system simpler and more efficient.

Claims (5)

In a hybrid design of a processor-embedded system in which hardware-software is mixed using a target disk based on an ARM processor / AMBA chipset, a method of synthesizing a software module interface and a hardware module interface, Receiving interface information of a hardware module and a software module; Generating a control signal relating to transmission and reception between a hardware module and a software module according to the interface information; Allocating a physical address of a memory map corresponding to the control signal; Automatically generating a hardware interface file that is responsible for the interface of the hardware module; And Automatically generating a software interface driver that is responsible for the interface of the software module Hardware-software interface synthesis method comprising a. The method of claim 1, The control signal is, Hardware-software interface synthesis method characterized in that determined according to the direction, type or size of data movement between the hardware module and the software module. The method of claim 1, Using a bus channel provided by the AMBA chipset as a channel for the interface between the hardware module and the software module, And using an interrupt provided by the ARM processor as a protocol for synchronizing data between the hardware module and the software module. The method of claim 3 The hardware interface file is, Selects a transmit / receive signal communicating with the software module in the hardware module, sets a register for transmitting / receiving, stores the signal and data of the hardware module, and determines a memory mapped I / O for the transmit / receive signal; And generating an interrupt of the hardware module, awaiting a response from the software module, and transmitting the signal to the hardware module when a signal comes from the software module. The method of claim 4, wherein The software interface driver, Select a variable to transmit and receive to and from the hardware module, determine a common storage space for the variable, generate an interrupt, operate the service routine of the generated interrupt, and deliver the necessary signal to the software module after the interrupt is acknowledged And performing a necessary operation in the software module, and transmitting the result to the hardware module through a predetermined variable.

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