A design methodology for compositional high-level synthesis of communication-centric SoCs

Abstract

Systems-on-chip are increasingly designed at the system level by combining synthesizable IP components that operate concurrently while interacting through communication channels. CAD-tool vendors support this System-Level Design approach with high-level synthesis tools and libraries of interface primitives implementing the communication protocols. These interfaces absorb timing differences in the hardware-component implementations, thus enabling compositional design. However, they introduce also new challenges in terms of functional correctness and performance optimization. We propose a methodology that combines performance analysis and optimization algorithms to automatically address the issues that SoC designers may accidentally introduce when assembling components that are specified at the system level.