A Systematic IP and Bus Subsystem Modeling for Platform-Based System Design

The topic on platform-based system modeling has received a great deal of attention today. One of the important tasks that significantly affect the effectiveness and efficiency of the system modeling is the modeling of IP components and communication between IPs. To be effective, it is generally accepted that the system modeling should be performed in two steps; In the first step, a fast but some inaccurate system modeling is considered to facilitate the simultaneous development of software and hardware. The second step then refines the models of the software and hardware blocks (i.e., IPs) to increase the simulation accuracy for the system performance analysis. Here, one critical factor required for a successful system modeling is a systematic modeling of the IP blocks and bus subsystem connecting the IPs. In this respect, this work addresses the problem of systematic modeling of the IPs and bus subsystem in different levels of refinements. In the experiments, we found that by applying our proposed IP and bus modeling methods to the MPEG-4 application, we are able to achieve 4x performance improvement and at the same time, reduce the software development time by 35%, compared to that by conventional modeling methods. 1