Development and validation of Nessie: a multi-criteria performance estimation tool for SoC

The paper presents Nessie, an original multicriteria exploration tool able to decide on functional and nonfunctional aspects of SoC´s based on the application and platform descriptions and the costs (energy, execution time, area, ...). Indeed, the different performance prediction tools we can find in the literature, aiming at helping designers to take decisions and find efficient solutions, have some limitations that we wanted to overcome. To validate our tool, we have chosen real case study. In particular, we present here an example based on a 3MF MPSoC platform executing a real time AVC/H.264 video decoding extended to 3D-stacked architectures. Results given by Nessie, based on the average wire power consumption, have reinforced us in the utility of such a tool to help designers to take decision, especially in huge design spaces like embedded SoC ones.