The review of heterogeneous design frameworks/Platforms for digital systems embedded in FPGAs and SoCs

Abstract

Systems-on-a-chip integrates specialized modules to provide well-defined functionality. To guarantee its efficiency, designers are careful to choose highlevel electronic components. In particular, FPGAs (field-programmable gate array) have demonstrated their ability to meet the requirements of emerging technology. However, traditional design methods cannot keep up with the speed and efficiency imposed by the embedded systems industry, so several frameworks have been developed to simplify the design process of an electronic system, from its modeling to its physical implementation. This paper illustrates some of them and presents a comparative study between them. Indeed, we have selected design methods of SoC (ESP4ML and HLS4ML, OpenESP, LiteX, RubyRTL, PyMTL, SysPy, PyRTL, DSSoC) and NoC networks on OCN chip (PyOCN) and in general on FPGA (PRGA, OpenFPGA, AnyHLS, PYNQ, and PyLog). The objective of this article is to analyze each tool at several levels and to discuss the benefit of each in the scientific community. We will analyze several aspects constituting the architecture and the structure of the platforms to make a comparative study of the hardware and software design flows of digital systems.