Functional abstraction driven design space exploration of heterogeneous programmable architectures

Rapid design space exploration (DSE) of a programmable architecture is feasible using an automatic toolkit (compiler, simulator, assembler) generation methodology driven by an architecture description language (ADL). While many contemporary ADLs can effectively capture one class of architecture, they are typically unable to capture a wide spectrum of processor and memory features present in DSP, VLIW, EPIC and Superscalar processors. The main bottleneck has been the lack of an abstraction underlying the ADL that permits reuse of the abstraction primitives to compose the heterogeneous architectures. We present the functional abstraction needed to capture such wide variety of programmable architectures. We illustrate the usefulness of this approach by specifying two very different architectures using functional abstraction. Our DSE results demonstrate the power of reuse in composing heterogeneous architectures using functional abstraction primitives allowing for a reduction in the time for specification and exploration by at least an order of magnitude.