Transaction-Level Prototyping of a UMTS Outer-Modem for System-on-Chip Validation and Architecture Exploration

Growing demand for mobility and multimedia capacity inhandheld devices translates into very complex systemswhere time-to-market development is critical. High datarates and improved system capacity for IP-based servicesincrease controlling and dynamic scheduling of alreadycomplex modem technologies. This paper describes theprototyping of a UMTS terminal subsystem, which dealswith several physical layer tasks such as channel multiplexingor interleaving. Our modeling strategy relies on atransaction-level platform methodology built on top of theSystemC language. The system-on-chip dynamics is modeledwith behavioral modules, generic bus transactions andmemory accesses. Several examples demonstrate that sucha prototyping makes it possible to validate highly dynamicsystems; this reduces system-on-chip development costs asit is recognized that about 70% of it lies today into verification.This prototyping also offers a large potential for fastarchitecture exploration with the capacity to dimension thememory components or evaluate the bus contention.