Proposal for unified system design meta flow in task-level and instruction-level design technology research for multi-media applications

This paper describes an attempt to bring together the many different system design flows existing in architecture and system design technology research, into a more abstract but unifying meta flow. Many existing system and architecture design flows have a strong resemblance and unnecessary overlap. Mainly due to a lack of a common and consistent terminology coupled to a common reference basis, it is now nearly impossible to compare and reuse (sub)steps. In addition, there is a too strong separation between research in different communities. To alleviate this problem, we introduce a more abstract but unifying meta flow which attempts to bridge the gap between the existing flows. From this meta flow, a particular design flow can be instantiated for a given application (domain) by leaving out the non-required stages/steps, by selecting a (sub)step sequence which is compatible with the partial meta-flow order, and by selecting the appropriate technique for all remaining (sub)steps (e.g. the type of scheduler). This paper focuses on the principles at the task- and instruction-level abstractions. It also provides an illustration of the pourer of the meta-flow principles for a realistic multi-media compression demonstrator from the MPEG4 context.