EPIC-Explorer: A Parameterized VLIW-based Platform Framework for Design Space Exploration

The constant increase in levels of integration and the reduction of the time-to-market have led to the definition of new methodologies stressing reuse. This involves not only the reuse of pre-designed processing components in the form of intellectual properties (IPs) but also that of pre-designed architectures. For such architectures to be reused for various applications they have to be heavily parameterized. Several manufacturers, in fact, produce pre-packed solutions for various classes of applications, in the form of parameterized system-ona-chip (SOC) platforms. In this paper we present EPIC-Explorer, a framework to simulate a parameterized VLIW-based platform that will allow an embedded system designer to evaluate any instance of the platform in terms of performance, area and power consumption. The results obtained show that the framework can be effectively used to explore the space of possible configurations to evaluate the area/performance/power trade-off.