From Simulink to NoC-based MPSoC on FPGA

Network-on-chip (NoC) based multi-processor systems are promising candidates for future embedded system platforms. However, because of their complexity, new high level modeling techniques are needed to design, simulate and synthesize embedded systems targeting NoC-based MPSoC. Simulink is a popular modeling environment suitable to model at system level. However, there is no clear standard to synthesize Simulink models into SW and HW towards a NoC-based MPSoC implementation. In addition, many of the proposed solutions require large overhead in terms of SW components and memory requirements, resulting in complex and customized multi-processor platforms. In this paper we present a novel design flow to synthesize Simulink models onto a NoC-based MPSoC running on low-cost FPGAs. Our design flow constrains the MPSoC and the Simulink model to share a common semantics domain. This permits to reduce the need of resource consuming SW components, reducing the memory requirements on the platform. At the same time, performances (throughput) of dataflow applications can increase when the number of processors of the target platform is increased. This is shown through a case study on FPGA.