Abstract: Aiming at the problems of unsynchronized communication time and limited hardware emulation speed in the process of software and hardware co-emulation, this paper designs and implements a transactor of Advanced eXtensible Interface 4(AXI4) protocol. Based on transaction-level software and hardware co-emulation, combined with the characteristics of hardware description language (HDL) and software features of functional programming, a transactor of AXI4 protocol is designed using SpinalHDL, which uses the agile features of high-level language to efficiently process the transaction generation process, and accelerates the compilation process of the emulation verification stage. Based on universal verification methodology (UVM), a verification platform was built to conduct functional verification on the designed transactor, and the results showed that the code coverage of the transactor comprehensively reached 99.17%, and the functional coverage reached 100%, meeting the functional requirements of the transactor. Using AXI Interconnect IP as design under test (DUT), transaction-level transmission was achieved on the domestic hardware emulator HyperSemu. Compared with VCS, the pure software simulation, the acceleration ratio reached 29.94, accelerating the verification speed of co-emulation and improving emulation performance.
Keywords: transactor; Advanced eXtensible Interface 4(AXI4); universal verification methodology (UVM); emulator; SpinalHDL