A Low Power, Programmable Networking Platform and Development Environment - Advances in Network-Embedded Management and Applications - page 28

The development environment consists of a modeling environment, where
the application is modeled in SystemC, and a hardware/software co-design
methodology, utilizing commercially available programming tools as well.
The development environment gives access for different levels of
complexity, from basic GUI-based modifications to full simulation/modeling
and co-design.

4.1 GUI based development

Starting from a provided generic application architecture, custom firmware
can be easily generated using available “filters”. There are several generic
modules available for packet manipulations that can be inserted at the packet
input/output processing stages of the architecture. These modules may also
provide a software interface, for setting filter rules, reading statistics etc. For
example, a simple firewall can be created by adding input and output filter
blocks

to the generic packet forwarding application. Adding NAT

functionality means inserting a NAT module at the egress interface.
Fig. 3 shows the structure of the development environment. The whole
development process can be done using the provided GUI. The GUI is written
in Java, integrates the tools into a development environment and provides
editing functions. The available modules are described in IP-XACT [12]
XML format, and they can be selected from the toolbox and with simple drag-
and-drop operations they can be inserted in the architecture. Composability is
ensured by using the IP-XACT specification format, and is automatically
checked while connecting the interfaces. Both the SystemC and VHDL
sources for the different modules are also provided, along with their IP-XACT
description. The new design can be tested by the SystemC simulation
framework, which provides traffic generators for performance testing and
predictability analysis. The top-level HDL file is generated automatically
based on the connections made on the GUI, and the final firmware can be
synthesized using the Xilinx ISE. As the new application is a modified
version of the generic application with filter components added, its
performance should not change, only an insignificant the latency is introduced
by the filters.
Besides the composability checking, a dependability and predictability
analysis is also possible. The framework will be extended to generate a
Continuous Time Markov Chain (CMTC) based dependability model of the
system stored in a view in the IP-XACT description, which can be used in
open-source simulators like the PRISM model checker [13]. A queuing model
of the hardware can also be created, which makes possible the analysis and
queue dimensioning for different traffic mix scenarios.