Model-Based Exploration of the Design Space for Heterogeneous Systems on Chip

Abstract

The exploration of the design space for heterogeneous reconfigurable systems on chip (SoC) becomes more and more important. As modern SoCs include a variety of different architecture blocks, ensuring flexibility as well as highest performance, it is mandatory to prune the design space in an early stage of the design process in order to achieve short innovation cycles for new products. Therefore, the goal of this work is to provide estimations of implementation specific parameters like throughput rate, power dissipation and silicon area by means of cost functions. A concept for a model based exploration strategy supporting the design flow for heterogeneous SoCs is presented. In order to prove the feasibility of this exploration strategy, first of all operations were implemented on discrete components like DSPs, FPGAs or dedicated ASICs. Implementation parameters are provided for a variety of basic operations frequently required in digital signal processing. These implementation parameters serve as a basis for deriving models for the design space exploration concept.