A Unified System-Level Modeling and Simulation Environment for MPSoC design: MPEG-4 Decoder Case Study

New generation electronic system-level design tools are the key to overcome the complexity and the increasing design productivity gap in the development of future multiprocessor systems-on-chip. This paper presents a SystemC-based system-level simulation environment, called CASSE, which helps in the modeling and analysis of complex SoCs. CASSE combines application modeling, architecture modeling, mapping and analysis within a unified environment, with the aim to ease and speed up these modeling steps. The main contribution of this tool is to enable this fast modeling and analysis at the very beginning of the design process, helping in the design space exploration phase. CASSE capabilities are disclosed in this work by means of a case study where an MPEG-4 decoder application is implemented on an Altera Excalibur platform