Manage Your Design Projects with Agnisys Collaboration Framework

Recently, I introduced Agnisys Collaboration Framework (CF) as a useful tool for managing your single source of truth (SST) executable specifications. In today’s post, I will fill you in on some of the capabilities we provide with this innovative solution. We’ve officially named it “IDS-CF” to make explicit its tight links with the other specification automation tools in our IDesignSpec™ (IDS) Suite. I’m only hitting a few highlights; IDS-CF provides lots more help for your IP and system-on-chip (SoC) projects.

Framework Overview

IDS-CF is a tool to enable more efficient IP and SoC design teams with seamless collaboration across all engineers worldwide. We focus on the Hardware-Software Interface (HSI) and the set of programmable registers by which software initializes, configures, and controls the hardware in your designs. Geographically dispersed teams can work on a project simultaneously, including real-time editing of your golden register specifications. 

IDS-CF provides a cross-platform graphical front-end for development of your address map, register architecture, registers and their fields, and register programming sequences. You can deploy using an on-premises or cloud infrastructure for maximum flexibility across your projects. Git-based version control ensures that changes to your specifications are managed and understood. You can generate HTML-based documentation for your registers, with many options available.

Wide Choice of Input and Output Formats

Our IDesignSpec Suite provides a great deal of flexibility in formats for specification input and generated outputs. You can specify your registers using standard, text-based formats such as SystemRDL, IP-XACT, JSON, and Portable Stimulus Standard (PSS). You can also specify your programming sequences using PSS, or you can use the sequences editor in our IDS-NG cross-tool front end.

We leverage the very popular Visual Studio (VS) Code platform to provide powerful specification editors supporting SystemRDL and PSS. We provide VS Code extensions for these two languages, enabling such features as syntax highlighting, auto-completion, real-time error detection, and linting. This makes your register specification more efficient, and free of coding errors. You can also specify your registers graphically by using the powerful interactive editor in IDS-NG. IDS-CF leverages these capabilities by accepting specifications in any of these formats and managing them across your entire project team. 

We automatically generate a wide range of outputs from our suite, using whichever formats you choose for the best integration with the rest of your project. We generate the RTL register design in SystemVerilog, Verilog, or VHDL as you prefer. We generate a testbench and tests built on the Universal Verification Methodology (UVM) standard. We generate C/C++ headers and tests for pre-silicon and post-silicon validation, as well as your choice of documentation. All of this is managed within IDS-CF.

Advanced HTML-Based Documentation

I think that our range of options for documentation output is noteworthy. Of course, we generate programmer’s reference manuals in PDF so that all teams have a common source for register and HSI documentation. Beyond this, IDS-CF generates dynamic and interactive manuals with advanced search, sort, and custom filtering capabilities. Ideal for verification, validation, firmware, and software teams, this enhances usability and supports large-scale documentation needs.

We provide many ways for you to customize the HTML documentation we generate, including a command line interface (CLI). You can choose available options such as:

• Smart search based on component name or address
• Regular expression (regex) searches 
• Sorting of columns in a Table of Contents (ToC) by size, by ascending/descending order, alphabetically, or numerically 
• Custom ToC columns based on properties or user defined values
• Name-based filtering based on register, register group, block, and name
• Filtering based on address range and size
• Format conversion for all numeric values of address, size, default, and repeat
• Document sharing via URL, not shared files
• Dynamic HTML for faster scrolling regardless of size

Security and Control

With a project spanning multiple teams, geographies, and time zones, you are doubtless concerned about protecting proprietary data from leakage or corruption. IDS-CF gives you all the tools you need to ensure data security and implement access control. You start by creating a new project and assigning ownership based on your team. You can easily re-assign projects as needed or delete them entirely if necessary. Full project control remains in your hands at all times.

The most sensitive projects may be run using an on-premises computing environment, which enables the tightest control. For cloud-based projects, easy but controlled access can occur from anywhere. You have access to advanced administrative access settings. For example, you can control access based on project role or specify access for specific individuals or teams. Either way, you can establish the customized security you need to protect your projects and the confidential data within them.

Conclusions

The main message for this post is that IDS-CF provides a flexible, customizable framework for management of your HSI-related golden specifications and the fast, automated generation of outputs from them. You can deploy across Linux, Windows, and macOS platforms with complete security and access controls to support both hardware and software engineers. IDS-CF fosters efficient team collaboration to maximize reuse, reduce redundancy, save project time, and improve productivity. I am certain that every IP and SoC team can add value by selecting our solution.