Architectural Design Exploration

A collection of algorithms and functional requirements must be implemented using one or more pieces of silicon.

Each major piece of silicon contains one or more custom or standard microprocessors.

Some silicon is custom for a high-volume product, some is shared over several product lines and some is third party or standard parts.

Design Partition: Deciding on the number of processors, number of custom processors, and number of custom hardware blocks.

The system architect must make make these decisions. SystemC helps them rapidly explore various possibilities.

Co-design and co-synthesis: two basic methods (can do different parts of the chip differently):

• Co-design: Manual partition between hardware and software,
• Co-synthesis: Automatic partition: simple `device drivers' are created automatically:

Co-synthesis not currently used in practice.

Example algorithm: MPEG compression:

• A-to-D capture to framestore,
• Colour space conversion (RGB->YUV),
• DCT transform and variable Q quantisation,
• Motion detection,
• Huffman encoding.

»MPEG Encoding 1 »MPEG algorithm 2