Solving Register Address Management Requires
"Sharing with a Purpose"

Complex system design today, whether targeted towards system-on-chip (SoC) or field prgrammable gate arrays (FPGA), means supporting systems with potentially thousands of IP blocks. Each of these blocks contains status registers, potentially tens of thousands of them, that control the behavior of the system. And many types of engineers need different views of that information - firmware engineers, hardware engineers, layout specialists, test engineers, technical writers, etc. This is a serious problem that now requires a serious solution, not a homegrown set of scripts.

While it is important to share the register address map information across the complete project team, it is critical to remember the total goal of the design team - to complete a working design. Therefore, you must consider all of the design information that must be maintained and communicated. This is "Sharing with a Purpose". Semifore's tools handle more file formats and more register functionality than any other commerically available tool. Beyond what is provided today, we are also directly involved in the ongoing work related to industry standards in this area.

Semifore, Inc. provides CSRCompiler™, an advanced software tool suite that helps specify, generate and manage the register address map of a design. Offering a single source for the specification of the control and status registers, this tool suite accurately generates the relevant views of the information for the hardware, software, verification, and documentation teams. The various views generated by CSRCompiler are:

• Synthesizable RTL: Verilog or VHDL
• Macro definition header files in C, OpenVera, Verilog, and VHDL
• Verification Classes definitions in VMM RALF
• Documentation: Dynamic HTML, Word®, Excel®, Framemaker®, DocBook
• Data Structures: Perl
• Interchange: Spirit IP-XACT XML, IEEE 1685

Address maps are specified in any of the following formats:

• Semifore CSRSpec
• Spirit SystemRDL
• Spirit IP-XACT XML, IEEE 1685
• Spreadsheet
• Legacy formats

For a more detailed introduction to basic register management concepts and using a tool to simplify the work and reduce errors please click here.

Semifore Inc. also provides services to help you transition from legacy tools to CSRCompiler.