Integrating Algorithm-Level Design and System-Level Design through specification synthesis

INTEGRATING ALGORITHM-LEVEL DESIGN AND SYSTEM-LEVEL DESIGN THROUGH SPECIFICATION SYNTHESIS by Jiaxing Zhang Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Engineering Northeastern University, August 2014 Prof. Gunar Schirner, Adviser Modern Multiprocessor System-On-Chip (MPSoC) designs face challenges in tremendous design complexity imposed by the wide range of functional requirements and versatile architectural platforms. The Electronic Design Automation (EDA) research has been striving to accelerate the creation, deployment and validation cycles from initial design modeling to final system delivery. However, establishing a universal, automatic and rapid design flow from concept modeling to heterogeneous implementations with synthesis, optimization and exploration capability remains an open challenge due to the overwhelming complexity, vastly different abstractions, and market adaptability and usability. This thesis introduces a specification synthesis approach that joins two design methodologies, Algorithm-Level Design (ALD) and System-Level Design (SLD), to establish a new AlgorithmArchitecture Co-design flow. We designed and implemented an algorithm-to-specification synthesizer: Algo2Spec, which out of an algorithm model captured in ALD, such as Simulink, synthesizes into an SLD languages (SLDL) specification (e.g. SpecC/SystemC) enabling SLD exploration. Expanding the rich sets of SLD facilities into higher abstraction levels in ALD forms a new joint co-design methodology. The new flow seamlessly spans from the Simulink environment down to heterogeneous implementations crossing multiple abstractions. Our tools empower designers to construct, simulate, validate, explore, and deploy models in rapid feedback cycles. Our results illustrated the opportunities and benefits of our approach on a set of real-world applications and showed a significantly shortened design time. In addition, we explore new optimization opportunities emerged from the specification synthesis with respect to Design Space Exploration (DSE) and software synthesis. We have identified several DSE challenges, such as selecting a suitable model granularity to balance the model

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