Communication synthesis for distributed embedded systems

Ti-Yen Yen, W. Wolf
Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Computer Aided Design (ICCAD)  
Communication synthesis is an essential step in hardware-software co-synthesis: many e m bedded systems use custom communication topologies and the communication links are often a signicant part of the system cost. This paper describes new techniques for the analysis and synthesis of the communication requirements of embedded systems during co-synthesis. Our analysis algorithm derives delay bounds on communication in the system given an allocation of messages to links. This analysis algorithm
more » ... used by our synthesis algorithm to choose the required communication links in the system and assign interprocess communication to the links. Experimental results show that our algorithm nds good communication architectures in small amounts of CPU time. Introduction This paper describes new methodology to cosynthesize communication links for real-time distributed embedded systems. Distributed co-synthesis is important because many e m bedded systems are heterogeneous distributed machines. Communication i s the bottleneck in many e m bedded systems, because communication links add both chip and board costs, and designers frequently underestimate peak load. Design decisions based on average communication requirements may lead to an infeasible design. The communication must be scheduled and allocated to determine feasibility, and communication synthesis interacts with process scheduling and hardware engine design. In this paper, we propose a bus model for communication in embedded systems with arbitrary topologies in which point-to-point communication is a special case. We extend previous work on delay estimation [19] to include communication delay. W e then use the delay estimates to develop methods for synthesizing communication links, based on a previous work on co-synthesis of distributed systems [20] . Our
doi:10.1109/iccad.1995.480025 dblp:conf/iccad/YenW95 fatcat:pvooop63a5ccjhkiahkeduucla