An accurate system architecture refinement methodology with mixed abstraction-level virtual platform

The increasing complexity of today's system-on-a-chip (SoC) design is challenging the design engineers to evaluate the system performance and explore the design space. Electronic system-level (ESL) design methodology is of great help for attacking the challenges in recent years. In this paper, we present a system-level architecture refinement flow and implement a dual DSP cores virtual system based-on the highly accurate mixed abstraction-level modeling methodology. The constructed virtual platform can run various multimedia applications and achieve high accuracy. Compared with the traditional RTL simulation, the error rate is less than 5% and the simulation speed is around 100 times faster. Using the architecture refinement flow, the system performance profiling and architecture exploration is also realized for the software and hardware engineers to scrutinize the complicated system.