Rapid prototyping for configurable System-on-a-Chip platforms: a simulation based approach

The design of any application on a configurable System-on-a-Chip (SoC) like Atmel´s FPSLIC is subject to a lot of constraints stemming from requirements of the application and limitations of the architecture. In a top-down approach a real-time MPEG 1 Layer 3 (MP3) decoder is designed on this SoC, which integrates FPGA resources and an AVR microcontroller core within a single chip. An intensive design space exploration based on simulations on different levels of abstractions is fundamental for a real-time implementation on this limited architecture. After determining a suited functional partitioning a special DSP is implemented on the FPGA, wherefore an instruction set simulator is build, which allows concurrent HW/SW development.