1.3. ESE Front End Design Flow

Figure 1-2. ES Environment

The inputs to ESE Front-End are the system definition consisting of a platform and application code. A library of processing elements, buses, bridges and RTOS is provided in ESE to develop such a platform. The retargetable timing estimation tool in ESE is used to annotate timing to the application code based on the mapping of application code on the platform components. The timed application and platform are input to the TLM generator tool that uses the bus and bridge models to generate a SystemC TLM. This SystemC TLM can be simulated by any commercial or freely available SystemC simulator to provide the performance metrics. The designer can use the metrics to make to application code and/or the platform in order to optimize the system for a particular metric.