Future applications for embedded systems demand multi-processor designs to meet real-time deadlines. The large number of applications in these systems generates an exponential number of use-cases. The key design automation challenges are designing systems for these use-cases and fast exploration of software and hardware implementation alternatives with accurate performance evaluation of these use-cases. These challenges can not be overcome by current design methodologies which are semi-automated, time consuming and error-prone. In this paper, we present a fully automated design flow (CA-MPSoC) to generate communication assist CA-based multi-processor systems. A worst-case performance model of our CA is proposed so that the performance of the CA-based platform can be analyzed before its implementation. The design flow provides performance estimates and timing guarantees for both hard real-time and soft real-time applications, provided the task to processor mappings are given by the user. The flow automatically generates a super-set hardware that can be used in all use-cases of the applications. The flow also generates the software for each of these use-cases, including the configuration of communication architecture and interfacing with application tasks. CA-MPSoC has been implemented on Xilinx FPGAs for evaluation. It is also available on-line for the benefit of research community and is used for performance analysis of two real life applications, Sobel and JPEG encoder executing concurrently. The CA-based platform generated by our design flow records a maximum error of 3.4% between analyzed and measured periods. In a mobile phone case study with 6 applications, the merging of use-cases results in a speed up of 18 when compared to the case where each use-case is evaluated individually.
al REF presented a design flow to generate multiprocessor platforms for multiple SDFGs.
Ca-mpsoc: An automated design flow for predictable multi-processor architectures for multiple applications
Journal of Systems Architecture
Computer Science