Communication Synthesis for SoC

Communication Synthesis for System on Chip

by Dongwan Shin

With the ever increasing complexity of system level designs and the pressure of the time-to-market in the design of System-on-Chip (SoC), communication between components is becoming more and more important. Communication design for SoCs poses the unique challenges in order to cover a wide range of architectures while offering new opportunities for optimizations based on the application specific nature of system designs. In this thesis, we propose a communication design methodology that enables rapid design space exploration in order to achieve the required productivity gains. We define communication abstraction layers, corresponding design models and transformations which refine abstract message passing channels down to a cycle-accurate implementation. We also implemented automatic model generation tools which apply transformations to a model in order to represent and implement design decisions taken from the users or from automatic synthesis algorithms. The experimental results show the benefits of our methodology and demonstrate the effectiveness of our automatic model generation for communication synthesis.