System-level power/performance analysis for embedded systems design
Amit Kumar Nandi, Radu Mărculescu · 2001
This paper presents a formal technique for system-level power/performance analysis that can help the designer to select the right platform starting from a set of target applications. By platform we mean a family of heterogeneous architectures that satisfy a set of architectural constraints imposed to allow re-use of hardware and software components. More precisely, we introduce the Stochastic Automata Networks (SANs) as an effective formalism for average-case analysis that can be used early in the design cycle to identify the best power/performance figure among several appli-cation-architecture combinations. This information not only helps avoid lengthy profiling simulations, but also enables efficient map-pings of the applications onto the chosen platform. We illustrate the features of our technique through the design of an MPEG-2 video decoder application.