A General Stochastic Framework for Low-Cost Design of Multimedia SoCs

Reliability and flexibility are among the key required features of a framework used to model a system. Existing approaches to design resource-constrained, soft-real time systems either provide guarantees for output quality or account for loss in the system, but not both. We propose two independent solutions where each modeling technique has both the above mentioned characteristics. We present a probabilistic analytical framework and a statistical model checking approach to design system-on-chips for low-cost multimedia systems. We apply the modeling techniques to size the output buffer in a video decoder. The results shows that, for our stochastic design metric, the analytical framework upper bounds (and relatively accurate) compare to the statistical model checking technique. Also, we observed significant reduction in resource usage (such as output buffer size) with tolerable loss in output quality.