Designing MPSoC platforms for throughput constrained applications with multiple use-cases

The number of applications executing on multimedia systems is increasing every year. These applications execute in different combinations, known as use-cases. Each application may require guarantees on its performance. Ensuring that all applications meet their throughput requirements in all use-cases with minimum silicon area is a design challenge. In this paper, we present a novel heuristic algorithm that can design MPSoC platforms and map tasks of multiple applications onto this platform while satisfying the throughput constraints of these applications. Our algorithm tries to achieve this goal with minimum hardware area. It exploits the mutual exclusion conditions for concurrent execution of applications, as specified with the use-cases, and allows sharing of resources between multiple applications. There are a number of other techniques (load balancing etc.) that also save resources by sharing them but the feature that distinguishes our work from other related techniques is the fact that in minimization of hardware resources, we not only optimize the computation resources but also optimize the memory and buffer requirements in the interconnect.