An Efficient Performance Estimation Method for Configurable Multi-layer Bus-based SoC

This paper proposes an efficient performance estimation method for configurable multi-layer bus-based SoC, which evaluates system performance in an early stage of design process. The proposed method uses data flow information obtained from a system-level profiling, an architecture-independent loosely-timed transaction level simulation, and constructs a system-level execution dependency graph. Then, based on each architecture-level model, the architecture-level execution dependency graph is constructed and analyzed to estimate the performance of each architecture. In the analysis, the behavior details of shared buses and multi-layer bus are determined based on the analyzed dynamic bus contention and bus protocols’ features. Experiments were conducted by modeling the multi-layer AHB and applying the method to estimate performance of the architectures executing JPEG encoder application. The proposed method estimates the performance of SoC with less than 8% of errors comparing to the results from accurate RTL simulations.