Design-Trotter: System-level dynamic estimation task a first step towards platform architecture selection

Abstract

The objective of this work is to explore the design-space of digital embedded systems, before the high-level synthesis or compilation steps, in order to converge towards promising architecture-application matchings. This paper presents the first step of the “Design-Trotter” framework. This step, dedicated to the system-level design-space exploration, is performed before the SoC architecture definition and consists of functional and algorithmic explorations of the application. The first sub-goal of this work is to exhibit all the available parallelism of the application by means of an efficient graph representation. The second sub-goal is to guide the designer by means of dynamic estimates. These estimates are dynamic since they are represented by parallelism vs. delay trade-off curves, where a point represents a possible architecture model in terms of parallelism options for both processing and data-transfer operations and also for local memory requirements. This paper presents the original techniques that we have developed and some experiments that illustrate how the designer can benefit from our work to build or select an architecture.