SEAS: A System for Early Analysis of SoCs

Abstract

Systems-on-chip (SoC) continue to be very complex to design and verify, despite extensive component reuse. Although reusable components are pre-designed and pre-verified, when they are assembled in an SoC there is no guarantee that the whole system will behave as expected from a performance, cost and integration point of view. In many cases this is because of faulty early design decisions regarding the architecture, core selection, floorplanning, etc. This paper presents a system for early analysis of SoCs which helps designers make early design decisions regarding performance, area, timing and power; and allows them to quickly evaluate cross-domain effects, such as the effect that an architectural decision may have on the performance and chip area.