Fast Template-Based Heterogeneous MPSoC Synthesis on FPGA

Our contribution lies in offering a fast and parametrized domain-space exploration to the designer, whose expertise drives the whole process while staying the actor of added-value creation. In this paper, we present two new features and two important improvements of our H-MPSoC synthesis framework. The first one is a new template-based approach for automated design space exploration and synthesis. A template describes an architecture model for a specific domain and has three levels of specifications each representing a different level of design expertise. We also rely on the Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) paradigm to provide flexibility, reusability and code generation for different FPGA targets. We have refined the communication models to get more accurate performance estimations. Finally, we also improved our mapping decision algorithm that drastically reduces the simulation time. The output is the synthesizable code of the hardware architecture, the adapted C code of the application and the project files for FPGA design tools. We use an MJPEG decoder as a case-study to validate our framework on a Xilinx FPGA.