ESL design and HW/SW co-verification of high-end software defined radio platforms

Multiple wireless technologies are converging to run on personal handhelds. The plethora of communication standards next to the cost issues of deeper submicron processing require handheld platforms to shift from sets of multiple application specific ICs (ASICs) to multi-purpose Multi-Processor System-on-Chip (MPSoC) on which Software Defined Radios (SDR) are run. SDR design faces hard real-time processing and data transfer latency constraints. Designing SDR under stringent time-to-market (cost), energy and real-time processing constraints requires the help of advanced Electronic System-Level (ESL) design methodologies. This paper demonstrates an integrated ESL design flow built on advanced ESL tools to design SDR platforms for handhelds. We share the experience from creation of a high-level virtual platform model down to hardware/software (HW/SW) co-verification of a large scale SoC (5 million gates+). Incremental RTL verification based on co-simulation and co-emulation is also presented.