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Reuse of IP blocks is an important design philosophy for
embedded systems. This allows shorter design cycles under tight
time-to-market constraints. However, reusing IP blocks often
requires designing converters (glue logic) to enable their
communication. In this paper, we study the problem of
automatically generating a protocol converter which enables various
embedded system components (possibly with incompatible protocols) to
talk to each other. Our work takes as input, a rich description of
inter-component interactions described as a collection of Message
Sequence Charts. We then automatically synthesize from this input a
protocol converter in SystemC. Our work is not restricted to
uni-directional communication and the converter can be used to
broker communication among many components. We demonstrate the
feasibility of our approach by modelling some
simplified bus protocols that capture key features of existing
System-on-Chip bus protocols. We then generate the bus controller as
the protocol converter.
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