Rapid prototyping of NoC-based MPSoC based on dataflow modeling of real-world applications

Abstract

Most existing works on application mapping for Multiprocessor System-on-Chip (MPSoC) use either simulation or analytical modeling to evaluate their mapping solutions. However, the use of these evaluation approaches is not as accurate as prototyping on a real MPSoC system. Rapid prototyping on a reconfigurable logic platform for design space exploration is also not trivial as tasks have to be developed ground-up. This paper proposes a development environment for fast NoC-based MPSoC application prototyping. A conversion method called CAL2NoC is proposed to convert a high-level dataflow model of real-world applications to multiple executable C codes (tasks). These application tasks are executed on emulated Network-on-Chip (NoC) based MPSoC platform and run-time performance traces are collected. CAL2NoC facilitates prototype-based design space exploration for real-world applications using emulated MPSoC platform for practical performance evaluation. As a proof-of-concept, JPEG encoder is profiled using the proposed method. It has been shown that the proposed method facilitates a rapid development of emulated MPSoC for accurate application mapping evaluation.