System-Level Design Methods for Heterogeneous SoC Platforms

Heterogeneous system-on-chip (SoC) architectures are emerging as a fundamental
computing platform for a variety of systems from data centers to mobile devices.
Design productivity for SoC platforms depends on creating and maintaining
reusable components at higher levels of abstraction and on hierarchically
combining them to form optimized subsystems. While the design of a single
component is important, the critical challenges are in the integration and
management of many heterogeneous components, including programmable cores and
specialized hardware accelerators. In addressing these challenges we sustain
that communication plays an increasingly central role both at design time and
run time.  We propose a communication-based system-level design methodology that
simplifies the design and validation of heterogeneous SoC platforms by enabling
important properties like modularity, scalability, flexibility, and reusability.
We also present recent results on Supervised Design-Space Exploration: this is a
novel approach to leverage synthesis tools for the characterization of
accelerators with respect to their power/performance tradeoffs, a key step to
enable efficient design reuse across various architectures.