This section is a review of actual hardware components and bus structures found on chips. Schematics and illustrative RTL fragments are provided.
In the old-fashioned approach, we notice that the hand-crafted RTL used for the hardware implementation has no computerised connection with the firmware, device drivers or non-synthesisable models used for architectural exploration. Later we briefly look at how IP-XACT solves this.
We start with revision of basic computer architecture ...