A Framework for Cosynthesis of Memory and Communication Architectures for MPSoC

Abstract

Memory and communication architectures have a significant impact on the cost, performance, and time-to-market of complex multiprocessor system-on-chip (MPSoC) designs. The memory architecture dictates most of the data traffic flow in a design, which in turn influences the design of the communication architecture. Thus, there is a need to cosynthesize the memory and communication architectures to avoid making suboptimal design decisions. This is in contrast to traditional platform-based design approaches where memory and communication architectures are synthesized separately. In this paper, the authors propose an automated application-specific cosynthesis framework for memory and communication architecture (COSMECA) in MPSoC designs. The primary objective is to design a communication architecture having the least number of buses, which satisfies performance and memory-area constraints, while the secondary objective is to reduce the memory-area cost. Results of applying COSMECA to several industrial strength MPSoC applications from the networking domain indicate a saving of as much as 40% in number of buses and 29% in memory area compared to the traditional approach