Automatic Communication Synthesis with Hardware Sharing for Multi-Processor SoC Design
Yuki Ando, Seiya Shibata, Shinya Honda, Hiroyuki Tomiyama, Hiroaki Takada · IEICE Transactions on Fundamentals of Electronics Communications and Computer Sciences · 2010
We present a hardware sharing method for design space exploration of multi-processor embedded systems. In our prior work, we had developed a system-level design tool named SystemBuilder which automatically synthesizes target implementation of a system from a functional description. In this work, we have extended SystemBuilder so that it can automatically synthesize an area-efficient implementation which shares a hardware module among different applications. With SystemBuilder, designers only need to enable an option in order to share a hardware module. The designers, therefore, can easily explore a design space including hardware sharing in short time. A case study shows the effectiveness of the hardware sharing on design space exploration.