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model. Second, the interface between the design tools and the use case simulators
should be specified and implemented by using a widely accepted and standardized
interface. Standard interfaces are characterized by being supported by a large number
of parsing and validation tools either in the public domain or commercially avail-
able while enabling a faster adoption of the design tool itself. Among the available
interface specification languages, the most widely accepted and flexible is XML.
XML enables to create efficient, customized data structures which are, at the same
time, supported by industrial and academic tools for parsing, semantic evaluation
and validation. These data structures can be used to facilitate the definition of tool
interfaces.
The Chapter is organized as follows. Section 1.2 provides an overview of the
MULTICUBE design flow, while Sect. 1.3 describes the design tools integration
based on a common interface. Finally, Sect. 1.4 presents the advantages in using the
automatic design space exploration approach.
1.2
Overview of the Design Flow
The MULTICUBE DSE flow (see Fig. 1.1 ) is based on the interaction of two frame-
works to be used at design time: the Design Space Exploration Framework, an
architecture exploration set of tools, and the Power/Performance Estimation Frame-
work, a set of modeling and simulation tools operating at several levels of abstraction.
The DSE flow also includes a Run-time Resource Manager to select at run-time the
best design alternatives in terms of power/performance trade-offs generated during
the design-time exploration phase.
According to the exploitation plan of the MULTICUBE project, both open-source
and the proprietary exploitation models and tools co-exist into a single coherent
view. This has been possible by making the design tools to adopt the same common
MULTICUBE XML-based interface described in Sect. 1.3.
1.2.1
The Design Space Exploration Framework
The MULTICUBE Design Space Exploration Framework (see Fig. 1.1 ) consists of
an architecture exploration set of tools providing the designers with the most appro-
priate optimisation of the multi-processor SoC considering several figures of merit
such as performance and energy consumption.
The Design Space Exploration tools can be used at design time to automatically
identify the Pareto optimal solutions of a multi-objective exploration given a set of
design space parameters. During the MULTICUBE project, two design space explo-
ration tools and some optimisation and analytical techniques have been developed
and validated.
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