Abeto framework: a Solution for Heterogeneous IP Management

The use of third-party IP cores tends to present difficulties because of a lack of standardization in their packaging, distribution and management. Often, IP users find themselves writing code to enable the integration or testing of the IP core, which is not available as part of their distribution. In this work Abeto is presented, a new software tool for IP core databases management. It has been conceived to integrate and use a heterogeneous group of IP cores, described in HDL, with an unified set of instructions. In order to do so, Abeto requires from every IP core some side information about its packaging and how to operate with the IP. Currently, Abeto provides support for a set of common EDA tools and has been successfully applied to the European Space Agency portfolio of IP cores for benchmarking purposes. To demonstrate this extent, implementation results for these IP cores on the NanoXplore BRAVE FPGA family are provided, obtained through Abeto.