Model driven engineering for MPSOC design space exploration

This paper presents a Model Driven Engineering approach for MPSoC Design Space Exploration (DSE) to deal with the ever-growing challenge of designing complex embedded systems. This approach allows the designer to automatically select the most adequate modeling solution for application, platform, and mapping between application and platform, in an integrated and simultaneous way and at a very early design stage, before system synthesis and code generation have been performed. The exploration is based on high-level estimates of physical characteristics of each candidate solution. In an experimental setting, the DSE tool automatically performs four design activities: it selects the number of processors, maps tasks to processors, allocates processors to bus segments, and sets the voltage of each processor. Experimental results, extracted from a DSE scenario for a real application, show that the proposed estimation and exploration approach may find a suitable solution regarding the design requirements and constraints in a very short time, with an acceptable accuracy, without relying on costly synthesis-and-simulation cycles.