Automatic Generation of Protocol Converters from Scenario-Based Specifications

Abstract

Reuse of IP blocks is an important design philosophy for embedded systems. This allows shorter design cycles under tight time-to-market constraints. However, reusing IP blocks often requires designing converters (glue logic) to enable their communication. In this paper, we study the problem of automatically generating a protocol converter which enables various embedded system components (possibly with incompatible protocols) to talk to each other. Our work takes as input, a rich description of inter-component interactions described as a collection of message sequence charts. We then automatically synthesize from this input a protocol converter in SystemC. Our work is not restricted to uni-directional communication and the converter can be used to broker communication among many components. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach by modelling some simplified bus protocols that capture key features of existing system-on-chip bus protocols. We then generate the bus controller as the protocol converter.