Designing SOCs with Configured Cores

5.12. Existing Design Tools for Complex SOC Designs

With all of the available interconnect schemes for multiple-processor architectures, good system-design tools are essential. A variety of existing SOC construction, simulation and analysis design-tool environments support graphical SOC architecture and platform design using a library of standard components including embedded processors, memories, special hardware blocks, and peripherals all linked with familiar, conventional bus topologies. These existing design tools allow system simulation of processor-based SOC designs using instruction-set simulator (ISS) models for processors and SystemC models (or possibly RTL models if high-level models are not available) for other component types.