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Early embedded SW development with transaction-level models has been broadly promoted to improve SoC design productivity. But the proposed APIs only provide low-level read/write operations via a TLM interconnect. SW developers have to implement platform-specific communication procedures and handshake protocols to access HW functions, which requires a deep understanding of both the HW interfaces and the TLM fabric used. In this paper, we propose our concept of hardware procedure calls (HPC) with which HW services are provided to SW processes as remote methods on top of transaction-level communication. To this end, a lightweight HPC protocol is presented, and we propose a method to generate the infrastructure for HPC communication from a straightforward input description. Our experiments show that with HPC, embedded SW development is considerably made easier, and that also the effort to create the transaction-level model itself is reduced.

In this paper we present a generic interconnect fabric for transaction level modelling tackeling three major aspects. First, a review of the bus and IO structures that we have analysed, which are common in todays system on chip environments, and require to be modelled at a transaction level. Second our findings in terms of the data structures and interface API's that are required in order to model those (and we believe other) busses and IO structures. Third the surrounding infrastructure that we believe can, and should be in place to support the modelling of those busses and IO structures. We will present the infrastructure that we have built, and indicate where our future work will head.

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