Mahler: Sketch-Based Model-Driven Virtual Prototyping

Abstract

Virtual prototyping and Electronic System Level (ESL) modeling have become valuable resources to cope with the ever-increasing complexity of embedded systems. Their effectiveness, however, is highly dependent on their quick development time and accuracy, both conflicting goals. In this paper, we present a novel tool, Mahler, to accelerate the development of ESL models. Mahler provides an early design phase playground to manually explore the modeling of functionality at a high level of abstraction and analyze its performance on different architecture implementations very fast. It generates a ready-to-execute source code functional model in an open source SystemC-based language, bridging the gap between a design's very preliminary stage and a more mature design stage that can serve as a starting point for automatic design space exploration on existing ESL design flows. Mahler achieves this through the most natural interface: the designer's pen, enabling an intuitive model-driven creation of virtual prototypes following the Y-chart approach; literally sketching actor-oriented functional models at the ESL which are then mapped to the architecture platform for a simulation-based evaluation of power and performance. We demonstrate its advantage in terms of improved design productivity through the implementation of an MPEG-4 encoder virtual prototype.