Component-based design approach for multicore SoCs

This paper presents a high-level component-based methodology and design environment for application-specific multicore SoC architectures. Component-based design provides primitives to build complex architectures from basic components. This bottom up approach allows design-architects to explore efficient custom solutions with best performances. This paper presents a high-level component-based methodology and design environment for application-specific multicore SoC architectures. The system specifications are represented as a virtual architecture described in a SystemC-like model and annotated with a set of configuration parameters. Our component-based design environment provides automatic wrapper-generation tools able to synthesize hardware interfaces, device drivers, and operating systems that implement a high-level interconnect API. This approach, experimented over a VDSL system, shows a drastic design time reduction without any significant efficiency loss in the final circuit.