Hardware-dependent software synthesis for many-core embedded systems

ABSTRACT

This paper presents synthesis of Hardware Dependent Software (HdS) for multicore and many-core designs using Embedded System Environment (ESE). ESE is a tool set, developed at UC Irvine, for transaction level design of multicore embedded systems. HdS synthesis is a key component of ESE backend design flow. We follow a design process that starts with an application model consisting of C processes communicating via abstract message passing channels. The application model is mapped to a platform net-list of SW and HW cores, buses and buffers. A high speed transaction level model (TLM) is generated to validate abstract communication between processes mapped to different cores. The TLM is further refined into a Pin-Cycle Accurate Model (PCAM) for board implementation. The PCAM includes C code for all the HdS layers including routing, packeting, synchronization and bus transfer. The generated HdS methods provide a library of application level services to the C processes on individual SW cores. Therefore, the application developer does not need to write low level HdS for board implementation. Synthesis results for an multi-core MP3 decoder design, using ESE, show that the HdS is generated in order of seconds, compared to hours of manual coding. The quality of synthesized code is comparable to manually written code in terms of performance and code size.

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