Using Models for SoC Hardware/Software Co-design

The topic of SoC design raises several challenges like: partitioning across hardware/software boundaries, inclusion of analog and mixed-signal (AMS) components, having a multidisciplinary team work together, verifying the complete system and more. In this session we will review how the MATLAB/Simulink environment can be used to model a SoC system, later generating HDL and C code from this model, thus addressing those challenges. The unified hardware/software co-design workflow can be used from the project’s early stages of algorithm design and architecture exploration, through detailed design all the way to automatically generating production quality C and HDL codes from the model. This environment facilitates mutual simulation, verification and validation of hardware, software and AMS components from the early project stages on, thus minimizing the possibility of costly project delays due to late discovered bugs. The Model-Based Design approach allows the diverse project team to reach higher levels of work efficiency, which combined with the shorter design iteration cycles, results in a better final system performance.