An evolutionary approach to system-level synthesis
Jürgen Teich, Tobias Blickle, Lothar Thiele · 1997
In this paper, we consider system- level synthesis as the problem of optimally mapping a task-level specification onto a heterogeneous hardware/software architecture. This problem requires (1) the selection of the architecture (allocation) including general purpose and dedicated processors, ASICs, buses and memories, (2) the mapping of the algorithm onto the selected architecture in space (binding) and time (scheduling) and (3) the design space exploration with the goal to find a set of implementations that satisfy a number of constraints on cost and performance. Here, a new graph-based mapping model is introduced to specify the task of system-synthesis as an optimization problem. An Evolutionary Algorithm is adapted to solve this problem and is applied to explore the design space of video-codec implementations. I. Introduction A. Optimization Methodology The proposed optimization methodology treats the problem of optimizing the mapping of a large-grain dataflow graph-based specifi...