Rapid synthesis of multi-chip systems

There is increasing demand for multi-chip implementations of a complex digital system from the consumer market. Although making correct system-level design decisions in the early design stages is a non-trivial task and has far-reaching impact on the final quality of the system, this process has not been fully automated. Among many considerations in designing a multi-chip system, reducing the time-to-market is the one of the most critical. In this paper we present EDEN, a software package which is based on a mixed integer-linear programming formulation of the multichip system synthesis problem. Our objective is to synthesize system architectures that have minimum prototyping time and satisfy the user-specified cost and timing constraints. We believe EDEN can speed up the system-level design process by helping the designer make early system-level design decisions through its capability to search the vast design space and to visualize feasible system architectures. Experimental results of EDEN on the synthesis of an MPEG description are presented