Efficient Design Exploration Framework of SW/HW Systems Based on Tightly-coupled Thread Model

In order to meet the increased computational requirement of today’s consumer portable devices, heterogeneous multiprocessor system-on-chip (MPSoC) architectures have become widespread. These MPSoCs include not only multiple processors but also multiple dedicated hardware accelerators. Due to the increase complexity of the MPSoC, fast and accurate design space exploration (DSE) for best system performance at early stage of the design process is desired. Any DSE solution is desired to provide best system partitioning scheme for best performance with efficient area utilization. In this paper we propose a design space exploration framework for heterogeneous MPSoC based on tightly-coupled thread (TCT) parallel programing model which can handles system partition exploration and HW synthesis exploration. The proposed framework drastically reduces the exponential size design space into near-linear size by utilizing the accurate HW timing models as the indicator for system bottleneck and guiding the enumeration process of HW version combinations. Experimental results shows the accuracy of the proposed method with an average estimation error of 1.38% for HW timing of each thread, and 2.80% estimation error for the system-level simulation, where the simulation speedup factor was in the order of 5,000 times. Currently the proposed framework partially depends on a high level synthesis (HLS) tool eXCite, but other HLS tools can be easily integrated into the proposed framework.