Synthesis of VLIW Accelerators from Formal Descriptions in a Real-Time Multi-Core Environment

Abstract

Designing, programming and design space exploration of predictable Real-Time systems on Heterogeneous Multi-Core platforms is a very complex task. The increasing validation costs and time-to-market pressure creates a desire to build systems that are correct by construction. Formal description based on Model of Computations (MoCs) is a convenient way to create high-level models of such systems. The MoCs provide abstraction and high level modeling through a clear set of rules based on mathematics, which can be used as input for system synthesis. A formal synthesis flow would then ensure that the resulting real-time system is both predictable and correct by construction, provided that all transformations used in the flow can be verified/trusted. In this paper we show how a Real-Time computation node in an MPSoC system, described using the Synchronous MoC, can be transformed into a VLIW accelerator. The created accelerator is incorporated as a computation node in a heterogeneous multi-core system implemented on an FPGA.