In our last blog post, we worked our way up the conclusion that our TrekSoC product can be used to verify designs that do not contain embedded processors. As we noted, there is not a widely accepted industry term for such devices. For the moment, let’s call them “transactional designs” since the majority of them take transactions in at one end and generate transactions at the other end, sometimes for two very different protocols, and are often bidirectional in nature.
The technological argument is simple. Most SoCs also have I/O ports, both standard buses and proprietary protocols, and TrekSoC must be able to talk to them, coordinate among them, and synchronize their transactions with generated C code running in the embedded processors. A purely transactional chip and testbench form a subset of the challenge for which TrekSoC is designed, so it’s not surprising that we can help. Today’s post fills in some more details.