Communication primitives driven hardware design and test methodology applied on complex video applications

Dedicated hardware realizations of new multimedia applications support high throughput in a cost-efficient way. Their design requires a correct translation of the high-level system definition into the final implementation at the RTL level. We propose a general systematic development and test methodology and apply it in the context of complex video codecs. The approach is based on a fixed set of communication primitives and uses a high-level functional C model as golden specification of the complete system throughout the design. A clear separation between I/O and computing allows the isolation of a single functional component. This module is developed individually and its functional correctness can be verified separately by extracting its input stimuli and expected output from the golden specification. The combination of RTL simulation and emulation on a prototyping platform enables exhaustive testing of the separate modules to assure functional correctness. In this way, the debug cycle during system integration is minimized.