Safe IP Integration Using Container Modules

In modern hardware and system design flows, tight time-to-market constraints can only be met by reusing existing code. Building blocks like floating-point units, embedded processors or bus components are readily available as Intellectual Property (IP). However, this practice of putting together third-party components conflicts with the high quality requirements which are common in the domain of safety-critical systems, since the correctness of the used IP blocks is difficult or impossible to verify. In this paper, we propose an approach for safe IP integration by isolating suspicious blocks inside provably safe container modules. In this way, system level properties can be checked assuming the correct behavior of the wrapped IP blocks. As a first step in this direction, we show how a container module implementing a bus protocol can be generated and verified automatically. We rely on a model-driven design approach using a domain specific language and model-to-text transformations.