Front-End Design Flows for Systems on Chip: An Embedded Tutorial

This tutorial describes the design flows, that is, the design steps and software tools required for designing modern systems-on-chip, focusing on the front end part. A simple flow starting with abstract design description in an HDL and going through transformations leading to physical design, is no longer adequate for the complex systems of today. A high end MPSoC (multiprocessor system on chip) today includes, apart from multiple processors, multiple memory modules, high performance interconnection network, custom hardware blocks, and a variety of controllers and interfaces. Some of the issues that need to be addressed while designing such systems are - integrated design of hardware and software, customization of processors for given applications in order to get the right power performance tradeoffs, use of certain platforms and pre-designed IPs, design of interconnection mechanisms among the processors and mapping of application onto the architecture. Therefore, our description of design flow includes several `sub-flows´ that are required to take care of these aspects.