Component-based design approach for multicore SoCs

Abstract

This paper presents a high-level component-based methodology and design environment for application-specific multicore SoC architectures. Component-based design provides primitives to build complex architectures from basic components. This bottomup approach allows design-architects to explore efficient custom solutions with best performances. This paper presents a high-level component-based methodology and design environment for application-specific multicore SoC architectures. The system specifications are represented as a virtual architecture described in a SystemC-like model and annotated with a set of configuration parameters. Our component-based design environment provides automatic wrapper-generation tools able to synthesize hardware interfaces, device drivers, and operating systems that implement a high-level interconnect API. This approach, experimented over a VDSL system, shows a drastic design time reduction without any significant efficiency loss in the final circuit.

A method to abstract RTL IP blocks into C++ code and enable high-level synthesis

“…Sustained by the increasing need to start the design and validation of multi-core SoCs at higher levels of abstraction (system-level design) [5], the use of high-level synthesis (HLS) is gaining consensus [11]: indeed, there are now several commercial HLS tools which are capable to take a single Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee.…”

xpipesCompiler: A Tool for Instantiating Application-Specific Networks on Chip

“…Networks on chip (NoC) architectures have been proposed to address the scalability challenge [1,2,3,8]. NoCs are scalable and compatible with design and reuse of cores, which is a critical feature required by SoC designers to meet tight time-tomarket constraints [4].…”

Amdahl’s Law Revisited for Single Chip Systems

“…Many popular "divide and conquer" design strategies such as component-based design (4) and the orthogonalization of design concerns in platform-based design (5) make similar assumptions that performance may be improved in isolation. The value of specificity is measured in terms of relative gains without considering that specificity may introduce systemlevel losses in performance.…”