Enabling Fast System-Level Integration and Prototyping of Accelerator-Rich Platforms
Gianluca Bellocchi, Alessandro Capotondi, Luca Benini, Andrea Marongiu · 2025
Accelerator-rich System-on-Chips (SoCs) combine general-purpose processors with Domain-Specific Accelerators (DSAs).The former provide flexibility and full support of legacy SW, while DSAs achieve high performance and energy efficiency through application-specific specialization.As DSAs are reused across various SoCs, they are evaluated in isolation with assumptions on the effects originating from their system-level integration.Our contributions include an open-source System-Level Design (SLD) methodology for fast integration and prototyping of acceleratorrich SoCs, which can easily capture behaviours emerging after an imprudent usage of platform resources.We evaluate three integration scenarios, where memory-and compute-bound DSAs are integrated into a RISC-V-based cluster and interact with a SWmanaged, multi-banked shared-memory subsystem.Results stress how a system-level conscious usage of memory resources can attain the nominal system bandwidth, thus denoting our approach effectiveness for the integration of accelerator-rich workloads.