Evaluating cost-performance tradeoffs for system level applications

Evaluation of design cost and performance is indispensable to system partitioning. In the absence of a system-level estimation and analysis tool, system partitioning is difficult to perform in an efficient and accurate manner because design evaluation can only be done after the final results are achieved. Furthermore, without cost-performance tradeoff information relating to different design alternatives, the designer can not make intelligent design decisions at the early system-level partitioning stages. In this paper, we present a system-level cost/performance evaluation approach which systematically explores the AT (Area-Time) design-space from a system description. This allows the designer to obtain first-hand design tradeoff information before the partitioning process has taken place. We have also developed a system-level interactive design evaluation system on top of the proposed approach. Experiments on a number of examples demonstrate that our approach provides the designer with a comprehensive system-level design evaluation method to effectively explore all possible design, alternatives in the early stages of system development