MAMPSx: A design framework for rapid synthesis of predictable heterogeneous MPSoCs

Heterogeneous Multiprocessor System-on-Chips (HMPSoC) are becoming popular as a means of meeting energy efficiency requirements of modern embedded systems. However, as these HMPSoCs run multimedia applications as well, they also need to meet real-time requirements. Designing these predictable HMPSoCs is a key challenge, as the current design methods for these platforms are either semi-automated, non-predictable, or have limited heterogeneity. In this paper, we propose a design framework to generate and program HMPSoC designs in a rapid and predictable manner. It takes the application specifications and the architecture model as input and generates the entire HMPSoC, for FPGA prototyping, that meets the throughput constraints. The experimental results show that our framework can provide a conservative bound on the worst-case throughput of the FPGA implementation. We also present results of a case study that computes the area-power trade-offs of an industrial vision application. The entire design space exploration of all configurations was completed in 8 hours. A tool-chain targeting the Xilinx Zynq FPGA is also presented.