Timed-SDF patterns for applications throughput analysis
Imed Eddine Bennour, Jemai Abderrazek · 2016
One of the major challenges facing the design of embedded systems is to estimate their performance before their implementation. This operation is part of the design space exploration, where different implementation choices are investigated. Synchronous data flow graphs (SDF) are powerful analyzable computation models for regular multi-task streaming applications. SDFs have the capability to model and to estimate analytically, at an early design step, the maximal achievable throughput of a streaming application mapped to an implementation. The estimation accuracy depends on the implementation details integrated in the final SDF model. While previous works have focused on the SDF modeling of resource sharing between the application tasks, this work focuses on the modeling of other implementation concerns such as functional pipeline, timed cyclostatic behaviors, and inter-task communication schemes. The aim of the proposed patterns is to get a better estimation of applications' throughput. A case study is used to demonstrate how these patterns are used to estimate the throughput of various co-design alternatives of an MJPEG decoder.