To overcome the complexity in System-on-Chip (SoC) design, researchers have developed sophisticated design flows that significantly reduce the development time through automation. However, while much work has focused on synthesis and exploration tools, little has been done to support the designer in writing and rewriting SoC models. In fact, our studies on industrial size examples have shown that about 90% of the system design time is spent on coding and re-coding of SLDL models, even in the presence of algorithms given in the form of C code. Since the quality of the design model has tremendous impact on the cost and quality of the resulting system implementation, creating and optimizing the model is a critical task toward successful SoC design.In this paper, we present an interactive source re-coder which integrates static analysis and code transformation tools into an editor to assist the designer in tedious modeling and optimization tasks. This novel approach allows the designer to use her/his limited modeling time efficiently, and thus yields significant gains in productivity.Keywords: System-level Design, Specification Modeling, Embedded systems, System-on-Chip
INTRODUCTIONIn the past, the system-level design community has focused on solving various problems of system synthesis. Researchers have been working towards design automation at various abstraction levels with the goal to automate steps in the design process and reduce the design time. Motivated by the need to meet the time to market and aggressive design goals like low power, high performance, and low cost, researchers have * This work was supported in part by Nicholas Endowment through the Henry T. Nicholas III Research Fellowship.
Pramod Chandraiah and Rainer Dömerproposed various design methodologies for effective design development, including top-down and bottom-up approaches. All these technological advances have significantly reduced the development time of embedded systems. However, design time is still a bottleneck in the production of systems, and further reduction through automation is necessary. One critical aspect neglected in optimization efforts so far is the design specification phase, where the intended design is captured and modeled for use in the design flow. Each design methodology expects a specific type of input model and most methodologies depend on intermediate design models for interaction between tools and the designer. The specification needs to be either hand-written from scratch, or modified from a reference model. While much of the research has focused on SoC synthesis and refinement tools, little has been done to support the designer in forming these models.
MotivationIn order to study the intricacies and complications involved in writing a system specification, we have applied a top-down design methodology, as shown in Figure 1, to the example of a multimedia application, a MP3 audio decoder. Here, the design process starts with an abstract specification model which is then refined to create models at lower a...