Characterization and optimization of behavioral hardware accelerators in heterogeneous MPSoCs

This work presents a method to characterize and optimize hardware accelerators (HWaccs) given as Behavioral IPs (BIPs) mapped as loosely coupled HWaccs in heterogenous MPSoCs. The proposed HWacc exploration flow is composed of two main stages. The first stage characterizes each BIPs individually by performing a High-Level Synthesis (HLS) Design Space Exploration (DSE) on each of the BIPs to obtain a trade-off curve of Pareto-optimal designs. It then continues by exploring the system-level design space using these Pareto-optimal designs and finding configurations with unique area vs. performance trade-offs. Our proposed system-level explorer makes use of cycle-accurate simulation models to explore the search space fast and accurately. Experimental results show that our proposed method works well for MPSoCs of different sizes ranging from systems with 1 to 4 masters and with 3 to 7 HWaccs.