LavA: An Open Platform for Rapid Prototyping of MPSoCs

Configurable hardware is becoming increasingly powerful and less expensive. This allows embedded system developers to exploit hardware parallelism in order to improve real time properties and energy efficiency. However, hardware design, even if performed using high-level hardware description languages, is error-prone and time consuming, especially when designing complex heterogeneous multiprocessor systems. To reduce the time to market for such systems, it is necessary to support the designer with a flexible workflow and methods for efficient reuse of existing components. In software engineering, this is enabled by using model-driven design flows and tools for configuration. In this paper, we describe LavA, a system which adapts these concepts to hardware design. By providing a streamlined toolchain and workflow to rapidly prototype complex, heterogeneous multiprocessor systems-on-chip based on a model-driven approach, developers can reduce turnaround times in design as well as design space exploration.