The MULTICUBE Design Flow - Multi-objective Design Space Exploration of Multiprocessor SoC Architectures - page 3

Chapter 1
The MULTICUBE Design Flow

Cristina Silvano,William Fornaciari, Gianluca Palermo, Vittorio Zaccaria,
Fabrizio Castro, Marcos Martinez, Sara Bocchio, Roberto Zafalon,
Prabhat Avasare, Geert Vanmeerbeeck, Chantal Ykman-Couvreur,
Maryse Wouters, Carlos Kavka, Luka Onesti, Alessandro Turco,
Umberto Bondi, Giovanni Mariani, Hector Posadas, Eugenio Villar,
Chris Wu, Fan Dongrui, and Zhang Hao

Abstract This chapter introduces the design-flow of the MULTICUBE project
whose main goal is the definition of an automatic multi-objective Design Space
Exploration (DSE) framework to be used to tune the parameters of System-on-Chip
architectures by taking into account the target set of metrics (e.g. energy, latency,
throughput, etc.). One of the important goals of the automatic multi-objective DSE
framework is to find design trade-offs that best meet system constraints and cost cri-
teria which are indeed strongly dependent on the target application. A set of heuristic
optimisation algorithms have been defined to reduce the overall optimization time
by identifying an approximated Pareto set of parameter configurations with respect
to a set of selected figures of merit. Once the approximated Pareto set is built, the
designer can quickly apply decision criteria to select the best configuration satisfy-
ing the constraints. The DSE flow is based on the interaction of two frameworks to
be used at design time: the Design Space Exploration Framework, a set of open-
source and proprietary architectural exploration tools, and the Power/Performance
Estimation Framework, a set of modeling and simulation tools (open-source and
proprietary) operating at several levels of abstraction. The DSE flow also includes
the specification of an XML integration interface to connect the exploration and es-
timation frameworks and a Run-time Resource Manager exploiting, at run-time, the
best software configuration alternatives derived at design-time to optimize the usage
of system resources.

1.1 Introduction

Many point tools exist to optimise particular aspects of embedded systems. However,
an overall design space exploration framework is needed to combine all the decisions
into a global search space, and a common interface to the optimisation and evaluation

C. Silvano ( )
Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione Politecnico di Milano, Milano, Italy
e-mail: [e-mail]