An Interactive Model Re-Coder for Efficient SoC Specification

Abstract

To overcome the complexity in System-on-Chip (SoC) design, researchers have developed sophisticated design flows that significantly reduce the development time through automation. However, while much work has focused on synthesis and exploration tools, little has been done to support the designer in writing and rewriting SoC models. In fact, our studies on industrial size examples have shown that about 90% of the system design time is spent on coding and re-coding of SLDL models, even in the presence of algorithms given in the form of C code. Since the quality of the design model has tremendous impact on the cost and quality of the resulting system implementation, creating and optimizing the model is a critical task toward successful SoC design.In this paper, we present an interactive source re-coder which integrates static analysis and code transformation tools into an editor to assist the designer in tedious modeling and optimization tasks. This novel approach allows the designer to use her/his limited modeling time efficiently, and thus yields significant gains in productivity.Keywords: System-level Design, Specification Modeling, Embedded systems, System-on-Chip INTRODUCTIONIn the past, the system-level design community has focused on solving various problems of system synthesis. Researchers have been working towards design automation at various abstraction levels with the goal to automate steps in the design process and reduce the design time. Motivated by the need to meet the time to market and aggressive design goals like low power, high performance, and low cost, researchers have * This work was supported in part by Nicholas Endowment through the Henry T. Nicholas III Research Fellowship. Pramod Chandraiah and Rainer Dömerproposed various design methodologies for effective design development, including top-down and bottom-up approaches. All these technological advances have significantly reduced the development time of embedded systems. However, design time is still a bottleneck in the production of systems, and further reduction through automation is necessary. One critical aspect neglected in optimization efforts so far is the design specification phase, where the intended design is captured and modeled for use in the design flow. Each design methodology expects a specific type of input model and most methodologies depend on intermediate design models for interaction between tools and the designer. The specification needs to be either hand-written from scratch, or modified from a reference model. While much of the research has focused on SoC synthesis and refinement tools, little has been done to support the designer in forming these models. MotivationIn order to study the intricacies and complications involved in writing a system specification, we have applied a top-down design methodology, as shown in Figure 1, to the example of a multimedia application, a MP3 audio decoder. Here, the design process starts with an abstract specification model which is then refined to create models at lower a...

Efficient Modeling of Embedded Systems Using Computer-Aided Recoding

“…However, writing proper executable system models is challenging, error-prone, and very time-consuming. For a simple MP3 decoder application, our experiments have shown that more than 90% of the overall design time was spent in creating and editing the system model [2]. Other studies also confirm that the model specification phase is a serious bottleneck in embedded system design.…”

“…Using our prototype implementation of an interactive source recoder [2], we provide experimental results that demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach and show significant gains in design productivity.…”

“…Computer-aided recoding is a designer-controlled approach that relies on automated source code transformations available to the system designer in form of a "smart" integrated development environment [2]. In this approach, the designer makes the decisions, whereas the tool automatically transforms the source code.…”

Computer-Aided Recoding to Create Structured and Analyzable System Models

“…An overview and brief discussion of such transformations is available in [Chandraiah and Dömer 2007a].…”

“…We perform recoding only on the pointers which bind to exactly one variable. If there is a possibility that a pointer could point to more than one 9 A discussion of the responsiveness of our interactive source recoder and detailed execution times of recoding transformations are available in [Chandraiah and Dömer 2007a]. 10 Only in erroneous or non-portable programs will arithmetic on a pointer make it point to different variables.…”