MULTI-OBJECTIVE DESIGN SPACE EXPLORATION OF MULTI-PROCESSOR SOC ARCHITECTURES FOR EMBEDDED MULTIMEDIA APPLICATIONS

Many point tools exist to optimize particular aspects of embedded systems. However, an overall design space exploration framework is needed to combine all the decisions into a global search space, and a common interface to the optimization and evaluation tools. The MULTICUBE project focuses on the definition of an automatic multi-objective Design Space Exploration (DSE) framework to be used to tune the System-on-Chip architecture for the target application evaluating a set of metrics (e.g. energy, latency, throughput, bandwidth, QoR, etc.) for the next generation embedded multimedia platforms. To support both the static and the run-time design exploration flow, the MULTICUBE project will develop a multi-level system specification and modeling framework to provide static and dynamic evaluation of the system-level metrics. The design methodology will be implemented at system-level in a set of open-source and proprietary EDA tools to guarantee a large exploitation of the results of the MULTICUBE project in the embedded system design community. The overall goal is to support the competitiveness of European industries by optimizing embedded hardware/software systems while reducing the design time and costs.
The MULTICUBE project is strongly industry-driven: two European industrial partners (STM-Italy and DS2) and STM-China will define the requirements of the design tools and validate step-by-step the results of the exploration tools to design a set of target industrial applications. The integration of design tools and the commercial exploitation of the tools will be done by an European SME, ESTECO. ALARI will be mainly in charge of the dissemination and exploitation activities. The research and technological development will mainly be done by IMEC, Politecnico di Milano, Universidad de Cantabria and the Institute of Computing Technology - Chinese Academy of Sciences. Politecnico di Milano will play the role of project management and coordination