UCI Cadlab
Technical Reports 2007
----------------------

TR-07-05

Disclaimer -- Permission to make digital/hard copy of all or part of any of the following publications and technical reports for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists requires prior specific permission.

 

PDF TR-07-05

Andreas Gerstlauer, Dongwan Shin, Samar Abdi, Pramod Chandraiah and Daniel D. Gajski,
"Design of a MP3 Decoder using the System-On-Chip Environment (SCE),"
CECS, UC Irvine, Technical Report CECS-TR-07-05, November 2007.

Electronic system-level (ESL) design is touted as a promising solution to sustain productivity in embedded system design in the presence of increasing complexities and decreasing time-to-market. The System-On-Chip Environment (SCE) provides such a SpecC-based ESL design solution. In this report, we demonstrate SCE as applied to the design of a MP3 decoder. Starting from a reference C code, an initial specification model is developed and several different architectural alternatives are explored for implementation on an ARM-based target platform. Using SCE, models for all alternatives are generated and a final, optimal multi-processor system-on-chip (MPSoC) design is selected.

Results of the SCE-based design process show the feasibility and benefits of the approach. Using SCE refinement and exploration tools, all models were generated within minutes. Including the time needed for model simulations, the overall exploration process was completed within an hour. Therefore, the design example demonstrates the capabilities of SCE for rapid, early design space exploration resulting in significant productivity gains.

 


Last update: November 2, 2007 by A. Gerstlauer (gerstl@cecs.uci.edu).