IP-XACT

informative? Normative? It is hard to describe hardware in a way that everyone in the team can understand.
It is hard to describe that same hardware in a way that arbitrary automation tools can parse.

You can decide to draw schematics, or write up an RTL(register transfer Level) description. Maybe a Transaction-Level Modeling (TLM) or even a simulation model for the sake of those who may want to test their understanding through tests. There are so many ways of describing hardware.

Things get more crazy if you are dealing with a complex and unique piece of hardware. You CANNOT just depend on a lengthy reference-manual to describe hardware.

IP-XACT tries to standardize this overwhelm of documents. It creates a more navigable index and description of description docs.
Think of IP-XACT as a document that acts as an index to other description documents.

The different document types are:

  1. Component
  2. Design
  3. Design configuration
  4. Bus definition
  5. Abstraction definition
  6. Type definitions
  7. Abstractor
  8. Generator Chain
  9. Catalog

IP-XACT has more access modes than SystemRDL and UVM. It borrowed a lot from the two.

(This topic is undone.)

Short Notes

  • all of its documents are in xml
  • It has 9 descriptive documents:
    • component
    • design
    • design configuration
    • bus definition
    • abstraction definition
    • type definitions
    • abstractor
    • generator chain
    • catalog