COSMECA: Application Specific Co-Synthesis of Memory and Communication Architectures for MPSoC

Memory and communication architectures have a significant impact on the cost, performance, and time-to-market of complex multi-processor system-on-chip (MPSoC) designs. The memory architecture dictates most of the data traffic flow in a design, which in turn influences the design of the communication architecture. Thus there is a need to co-synthesize the memory and communication architectures to avoid making sub-optimal design decisions. This is in contrast to traditional platform-based design approaches where memory and communication architectures are synthesized separately. In this paper, we propose an automated application specific cosynthesis methodology for memory and communication architectures (COSMECA) in MPSoC designs. The primary objective is to design a communication architecture having the least number of busses, which satisfies performance and memory area constraints, while the secondary objective is to reduce the memory area cost. Results of applying COSMECA to several industrial strength MPSoC applications from the networking domain indicate a saving of as much as 40 % in number of busses and 29 % in memory area compared to the traditional approach.