System Level Design Space Exploration for Multiprocessor System on Chip

Future embedded systems will integrate hundreds of processors. Current design space exploration methods cannot cope with such a complexity. It is mandatory to extend these methods in order to meet future design constraints. We believe one solution is to add a new design exploration step above current methods. This extension corresponds to an abstraction rising to provide designer with a restricted design space. We propose in this work to enrich the classical exploration approaches by a pre-exploration step which reduces the architecture design space. This new step (i) simplifies (ii) performs and (iii) makes possible, for a complex application the architecture exploration for future tera-scale multiprocessor-based systems. This method drastically reduces the architecture space at a higher level of the design flow which mitigates the codesign complexity and enables the designer to explore a large set of architectures.