System-Level Performance Estimation for Application-Specific MPSoC Interconnect Synthesis

We present a framework for development of streaming applications as concurrent software modules running on multi-processors system-on-chips (MPSoC). We propose an iterative design space exploration mechanism to customize MPSoC architecture for given applications. Central to the exploration engine is our system-level performance estimation methodology, that both quickly and accurately determine quality of candidate architectures. We implemented a number of streaming applications on candidate architectures that were emulated on an FPGA. Hardware measurements show that our system-level performance estimation method incurs only 15% error in predicting application throughput. More importantly, it always correctly guides design space exploration by achieving 100% fidelity in quality-ranking candidate architectures. Compared to behavioral simulation of compiled code, our system-level estimator runs more than 12 times faster, and requires 7 times less memory.