The Beach Solutions® EASI Tools Suite™ is a sophisticated
and extensible set of Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools
that accelerates the development of System-on-Chip (SoC) designs
and the integration of the final manufactured chip into an end
system.
The most sophisticated approach to SoC integration taken
by leading edge SoC manufacturers combines a top-down architectural
approach to integration and a complete solution approach to
product delivery. However, as the system integrators demands
have increased relative to functionality and time frames,
EDA tools have not kept pace in managing the exponentially
increasing number of register related deliverables and design
files.
Without using leading edge tools such as the Beach Solutions
EASI Tools Suite, the semiconductor vendor is forced to continually
spend time and resources re-entering register related information;
manually coding register related software, hardware or documentation
deliverables; manually maintaining consistency between different
views of the same register related data – hardware,
software, verification; and checking that the data entered
follows company-wide established rules and standards.
The Beach Solutions EASI Tools Suite resolves all of these
issues by approaching the problem from three perspectives:
Design Flow
| To create a complete and automated register management environment
and flow to Capture register related data;
Validate the data captured against pre-defined
design rules; and, automatically Generate
design and integration deliverables to ensure correctness
and accelerated delivery. |
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Use Model and Application Specific Tools
Provide tools that are targeted at the different engineering
disciplines within the SoC development and delivery team:
Standards and Extensibility
Ensure that all of these tools follow industry standards and
can seamlessly integrate into standard EDA tool flows or be
readily extended to integrate with internally developed proprietary
tools.
| The SoC Integration Acceleration Flow |
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Beach EASI Tool Suite Flow
Capture
The Beach Solutions EASI Tools Suite has five ways that this
data can be brought into the Beach Solutions design data model
for subsequent validation and auto-generation of deliverables.
- Automatic IP-XACT schema capture
- Capture from various standard file formats such as
Excel, Word, etc.
- Support for automatic capture from proprietary formats
in XML
- Register description language import
- An intuitive graphical user interface (GUI) for manual
input
EASI Core Graphical User Interface
(Note: the EASI Tools Suite GUIs support UTF-8 encoding for
worldwide language support.)
Validate
The most crucial step in this entire three-step process is
the validation of the data that has been captured to ensure
its correctness and subscription to industry, company or design
specific guidelines or rules. The Beach Solutions EASI Tools
Suite employs different tools and methodologies to ensure
data correctness before it is stored in the Beach data model:
- A collection of nearly 300 standard rule checks
- Extensibility to create custom rules
- An intuitive GUI to control the Design Rule Check
(DRC) process
- A command line interface (CLI) to control the DRC
process via scripts
- A custom rule creation application
- A rule management application
EASI Tools Suite provides a DRC engine and editing tool for
all of the objects in the EASI Database including registers
and bitfields.
In addition, EASI DRC provides a Watermarking technology
that is only created for a design after it has passed its
DRC rule set, thus enabling an independent assessment of the
quality of a design prior to release into subsequent development
stages or hand off to other design teams or deposit into an
IP library.
Generate
To auto-generate hardware, software, verification and documentation
deliverables is to provide the greatest boost to productivity
that can be made in a state-of-the-art SoC development flow.
Additionally, to utilize design data and auto-generate chip
in-circuit emulator and debugger configuration files further
streamlines the path to the end market by accelerating end-system
bring up. The Beach Solutions EASI Tools Suite comprises key
generator infrastructure above and beyond the generators themselves:
- A GUI by which to configure and control each generator
- A CLI to configure and control each generator via
scripts
- Run-time configurability of each generator
- Generator specific rules
- Customizable generators
- A generator customization GUI
Beach Solutions Generators are based on a proprietary generator
compiler technology.
Beach Solutions EASI Developer Suite
Beach Solutions provides an advanced product called the EASI Developers Suite. This
provides an environment within which existing generators can
be modified or developed from scratch.
| Use Model and Application Specific Tools |
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Each of the four main products within the Beach Solutions
EASI Tools Suite has been designed to meet the needs and practices
of each of the engineering disciplines that constitute SoC
and system integration teams.
For a discussion of how Beach Solutions EASI Tools Suite increases
the productivity of each design and development discipline,
please follow the appropriate link below:
The Beach Solutions EASI Tools Suite has been architected
from the ground up to accomplish two objectives with respect
to EDA tools and flows.
- Enable the user of a Beach Solutions tool to interact
with design data without creating any dependencies between
the data and its use.
- Ensure that all auto-generated deliverables adhere to industry
standards
Object Oriented Analysis Schemas
In order to decouple the design register data from its use,
schemas were implemented as a method of abstraction.
Object Oriented Analysis (OOA) schemas are employed by Beach
Solutions as a method by which tools are automatically configured
according to the attributes of the base data to be used by
the tool itself. As the attributes of the base data are captured
and stored in a schema, the OOA approach taken by Beach Solutions
becomes a schema of schemas architecture.
The Beach Solutions patent-pending “Database Tools”
invention describes how the IP block or system schema themselves
can be modeled and stored in a relational database.
By analyzing a set of design schemas that encapsulate a design,
like the IP block schema or system schema, a generic schema
can be produced, ie. A generic meta-description or schema
of schemas.
The schema of schemas can be used to facilitate a number of
processes that operate on design databases. This groundbreaking
approach has resulted in tools within the EASI Tools Suite
now being built on a set of schema-driven reconfigurable design
automation tools.
Each EASI Tools Suite application reads a design database
and identifies the associated schema type and version. The
particular schema is itself persisted as an XML database.
The particular tool operates on the design data by reading
a schema file to reconfigure its own architecture and then
reads the design database to populate the architecture.
Examples of database tools that are driven by the reconfigurable
architecture include data capture GUIs, data checking utilities,
design view generators, data parsers and translators.
Schema independence guarantees consistency of tools because
they are all based on the generic schema. The generic schema
can be a superset of all schemas employed within a design,
whether they are industry standard IP-XACT by The SPIRIT Consortium
or proprietary internal schemas associated with a particular
IP core or library.
Founded upon this base principle and architecture, the Beach
EASI Tools Suite presents to each engineer an application
specific environment and use model that optimizes their interaction
with the design register database to maximize their productivity.
At the same time, because all of the design register data
is held in a single data model, the data presented, modified
and added by each of the engineers in the SoC development
team is synchronized with all of the other views that different
engineers may have into the data. Essentially, this presents
to each individual engineer a customized view into standardized
data.
EDA Tool Compatibility
The greatest effort has been made by Beach Solutions to ensure
that the EASI Tools Suite seamlessly integrates with existing
industry standard tools or can be readily modified to integrate
with proprietary tools and flows.
This is achieved using the employment of schemas as described
in the section above, but also through the architecting of
the design deliverable generators.
As a co-founder of the organization, Beach Solutions supports
The SPIRIT Consortium IP-XACT schema standard as a method
of importing and storing SoC design related data.
Additionally, generators within the Beach Solutions EASI
Tools Suite support a growing number of standard languages
and formats.
