Data reuse driven energy-aware MPSoC co-synthesis of memory and communication architecture for streaming applications

The memory subsystem of a complex multiprocessor systems- on-chip (MPSoC) is an important contributor to the chip power consumption. The selection of memory architecture, as well as of communication architecture, both affect the power efficiency of the design. In this paper we propose a novel approach that enables energy-aware co-synthesis of both memory and communication architecture for streaming applications. As opposed to earlier techniques, we employ a powerful compile-time analysis of memory access behavior that adds flexibility in selecting memory architectures. Additionally, we target TDMA bus-based communication architectures, which not only guarantee performance, but also greatly reduce the design time and allow us to find the energy optimal system configuration. We propose and compare three techniques: an optimal mixed ILP- based co-synthesis technique, a mixed ILP-based traditional two- step synthesis approach where memory and communication synthesis is performed sequentially, and a co-synthesis heuristic that synthesizes energy-efficient hierarchical bus-based communication architectures with guaranteed throughput. Our experimental results on a number of streaming applications show that both the traditional two-step synthesis approach and heuristic result in up to 50% worse power consumption in comparison with proposed co-synthesis approach. However, on some of the streaming benchmarks, our co-synthesis heuristic approach was able to find optimal or near-optimal results in a much shorter time than the MILP co-synthesis approach.