Creating Explicit Communication in SoC Models Using Interactive Re-Coding

Abstract

Abstract-Communication exploration has become a critical step during SoC design. Researchers in the CAD community have proposed fast and efficient techniques for comprehensive design space exploration to expedite this critical design step. Although these advances have been helpful in reducing the design time significantly, the overall design time of the system is still a bottleneck. All these techniques assume the availability of an initial SoC input model with explicit communication, whose quality significantly impacts the effectiveness of the communication exploration techniques. Today, these initial models need to be manually written by engineers, which is tedious, error-prone and time consuming. In fact, our studies on industrial-size examples have shown that about 50% of the communication exploration time is spent on coding and re-coding of the initial specification model. In this paper, we propose an efficient interactive approach to explicit communication creation by automating some of the common coding tasks in specification models for communication exploration. Our results show significant savings in designer time.

Computer-Aided Recoding to Create Structured and Analyzable System Models

“…Despite these weaknesses, the measured results obtained here are complementary to estimated times (e.g. line 5 in Table V and results reported in [Chandraiah et al 2007]) and therefore add significant value that supports the benefits of our computer-aided recoding approach. 6.5.2 Results.…”

“…After that, since those variables are no longer global, explicit connections need to be established by recursively inserting ports in all affected behaviors across the hierarchy. The details of this transformation are beyond the scope of this article and are discussed in detail in [Chandraiah et al 2007]. …”

“…To aid the designer in coding and recoding, we have integrated our transformations into a source recoder [Chandraiah et al 2007]. Our source recoder is a controlled, interactive approach to implement analysis and recoding tasks.…”

An Interactive Model Re-Coder for Efficient SoC Specification

“…the designer while using the source re-coder on the MP3 design example. Table 2 shows the timing of different transformations as experienced by The table lists 3 transformations used to create explicit communication structure [2] in the SoC models, the number of times they were invoked for the MP3 example, and the resulting number of lines affected. The interactive recoding time in the table is the wall clock time as experienced by the designer.…”

“…Re-scoping variables across structural hierarchy Synchronizing variable access by introducing channels Introducing/Deleting ports in behaviors Besides, other basic transformations such as semantic-sensitive renaming, deletion, and dependency-analysis functions are also incorporated into the recoder The details of the above transformations are discussed in [2]. To prove the concept of instant refinement in the editor window, we will focus on the responsiveness of the recoder.…”