Multiprocessor System-on-chip Platforms: a Component-Based Design Approach

Component-based design provides primitives to build complex architectures from basic components. This bottom-up approach allows design-architects to reuse efficient custom solutions with best performances. This paper presents a highlevel component-based methodology and design environment for multiprocessor system-on-chip architectures. The design environment provides automatic wrapper-generation tools able to synthesize hardware interfaces, device drivers, and operating systems that implement a high-level interconnect API. This approach, experimented over the design of a VDSL system, shows a drastic design time reduction without any significant efficiency loss in the final circuit.