Design Space Exploration of Parallel Architectures - Multi-objective Design Space Exploration of Multiprocessor SoC Architectures - page 171

Chapter 8
Design Space Exploration of Parallel
Architectures

Carlos Kavka, Luka Onesti, Enrico Rigoni, Alessandro Turco,
Sara Bocchio, Fabrizio Castro, Gianluca Palermo, Cristina Silvano,
Vittorio Zaccaria, Giovanni Mariani, Fan Dongrui, Zhang Hao,
and Tang Shibin

Abstract This chapter will present two significant applications of the MULTICUBE
design space exploration framework. The first part will present the design space ex-
ploration of a low power processor developed by STMicroelectronics by using the
modeFRONTIER tool to demonstrate the DSE benefits not only in terms of objective
quality, but also in terms of impact on the design process within the corporate en-
vironment. The second part will describe the application of RSM models developed
within MULTICUBE to a tiled, multiple-instruction, many-core architecture devel-
oped by ICT, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China. Overall, the results have showed
that different models can present a trade-off of accuracy versus computational effort.
In fact, throughout the evaluation, we observed that high accuracy models require
high computational time (for both model construction time and prediction time);
vice-versa low model construction and prediction time has led to low accuracy.

8.1 Introduction

The embedded systems industry faces today an always increasing demand to handle
complexity in the design process, which together with the usual strong time-to-
market pressure, make essential the use of an automatic tool-based design flow. The
use of an automatic tool for Design Space Exploration (DSE) directly impacts on
the entire design process within the corporate, with benefits that can be measurable
(or tangible), like the reduction of the overall design process lead time, and also
qualitative (or intangible) like the streamlining and the reduction of human error
prone repetitive operations.
DSE tools for the automation of the embedded system design process do exist
today. The MULTICUBE FP7 European Research project has contributed to the

C. Kavka ( )
ESTECO, Trieste, Italy
e-mail: [e-mail]