Application-driven synthesis of memory-intensive systems-on-chip

Due to the increasing popularity of multimedia and communications applications, requirements for application-specific systems typically include design flexibility and data management ability. Since the development of such systems is a market-driven task, reducing the time to market and manufacturing cost, while still satisfying application performance requirements, is an important system synthesis requirement. We have developed a new approach for area optimization of core-based systems. The approach uses basic block relocation in order to reduce the number of cache misses and, thus, enable hardware savings during system synthesis. Given a processor model, a cache model, and a set of nonpreemptive tasks with timing constraints, the goal of the synthesis framework is to select a system configuration (processor, I-cache, and D-cache) of minimal area that satisfies the performance constraints. The system synthesis framework has two key components. The first component is a code optimization engine that relocates basic blocks within a given assembly program in order to reduce the number of cache misses. The second component is a search mechanism that leverages the improvements in code performance obtained by the first component to select the most area-efficient system configuration. In order to bridge the gap between the profiling and modeling tools, we have constructed a new performance evaluation platform. It integrates the existing modeling, profiling, and simulation tools with the developed system-level synthesis tools. The effectiveness of the synthesis approach is demonstrated on a variety of modern real-life multimedia and communication applications.