Introduction

This is the VIP's placeholder for our Design Objective Document or DOD. This is where we will build the list of requirements for VIP interoperability.

-- TomAlsop - 25 Jun 2008

Contents

Background

Definition of Interoperability

According to IEEE interoperability is the ability of two or more systems or components to exchange information and to use the information that has been exchanged. IEEE 90

So, Interoperability is the ability of a collection of communicating entities to:

• share specified information
• operate on that information according to a shared operational semantics in order to achieve a specified purpose in a given context [Carney 05].

Generally those entities can be systems themselves. To interoperate, one system must provide a service that is used by another. This cannot be achieved without, at a minimum, communication from the provider to the consumer of the service.

Relationship of Interoperable Systems

Ownership of Interoperable Systems

Interoperability in VIP Context

Unified VIP Semantics

VIP Framework General Description

OVM VIP Framework

VMM VIP Framework

API Interface to C-based Framework

Interface to SystemVerilog-based Framework

Types of Relationship in mixed VIP Frameworks

Supported relationship and ownership configurations in VIP

Levels of VIP Interoperability

Level 1: Interoperable logging service

Level 2: Interoperable subenvironments

Level X: Interoperable X

Level Y: Interoperable Y

Level 99: Source code interoperability for Doxygen extraction

VIP Documentation

General semantics guidelines

Documentation for the new VIPs should base on the common semantics developed in this VIP TSC.

Code documentation guidelines for Doxygen

About Doxygen

Doxygen is an automated code documentation system that extracts documentation from source files including comments in those files with special tags. Doxygen can generate output in HTML as well as in CHM, RTF, PDF, LaTeX, PostScript and other format and provides easy navigation and other nice features such as class inheritance diagrams.

Doxygen supports natively C++ and can support SystemVerilog through an external Perl parser.

Doxygen Tags

General guidelines for placement of Doxygen tags in SystemVerilog VIP

References

[Carney 05] Carney, D.; Fisher, D.; & Place, P. Topics in Interoperability: System-of-Systems Evolution (CMU/SEI-2005-TN-002). Pittsburgh, PA: Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, 2005. http://www.sei.cmu.edu/publications/documents/05.reports /05tn002.html -- EugeneNovozhilov - 08 Jul 2008