CORBA Based Co-Verification Methodology For System Design
Pascal Giard, École de technologie supérieure, Canada

The electronic design field contains a plethora of modeling languages and tools each of which excels in its respective application domain. Integrating different modeling languages and tools is too often a repetitive and tedious task. Modeling languages representing systems at various abstraction levels usually require domain adaptation. Moreover, external interfaces of verification tools differ from each other. To overcome these, we here present a methodology based on transactors for data adaptation and the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) for communication.

This methodology encourages designers to use the right tools for the right tasks. As communication is done with standard Object Request Brokers (ORBs), any tool which can be interfaced with an ORB can later be integrated with other tools. As a result once the language-specific transactors are written, this methodology enables design co-verification even if the design is written in different languages representing various abstraction levels spread among many tools. Hence, we define two distinct usages for this methodology namely heterogeneous design verification and fined-grained design refinements.

As an example of the second usage of this methodology, one can co-verify an untimed functional Finite Impulse Response (FIR) filter written in SystemC running in the Open SystemC Initiative (OSCI) simulator (TLM), a cycle accurate FIR filter written in VHDL running in GHDL (RTL), a synthetized FIR filter running on a FPGA-based development board (early hardware verification) and a golden model running in MathWorks MATLAB/Simulink (algorithmic level). Given its high-level advantage, MathWorks MATLAB/Simulink can also be used for data generation and result validation.

The novelty of this approach is how we have integrated CORBA with SystemC to achieve seamless design tools integration. Moreover, our integration of TAO to SystemC does not require any modification to the OSCI simulator kernel. Furthermore, this methodology is platform and language independent as tools may run under various operating systems and interface definition language code generators exists for a large spectrum of programming languages.

Our presentation shows how we have integrated The ACE ORB (TAO) to the SystemC OSCI simulator, to MathWorks MATLAB/Simulink and to GHDL. That includes tool-specific adaptors, interface definition, code generation and design wrappers. Lastly, some practical transactor examples are shown and briefly explained.