A Hardware/Software Design Space Exploration for Efficient Video Compression on ESA missions

Electronics design of complex systems is not trivial when it is directly addressed at RTL. Under highly timing-constrained projects, such as space missions, it is useful to quickly develop a system model with a higher level of abstraction than RTL to identify critical processing stages that could prevent from achieving design goals in terms of performance, hardware occupancy and/or power consumption. At the same time, the development time at RTL could be reduced, since some of the main issues are already detected and solved in the high-level model. This work presents a mixed DSE strategy, combining software profiling with HLS models. While software profiling allows to quickly identify the critical stages of the system functionality from a computational point of view, the HLS design methodology permits to evaluate those critical system stages but considering their implications when the design is implemented on hardware. The use case is the development of a video compression IP core for future ESA missions, compliant with the H.264 standard, which is a highly-parameterized algorithm with several features. Therefore, at early stages it is important to restrict the options of the standard to those that will keep the project performance goals while limiting the hardware occupancy.