High-level dataflow design of signal processing systems
for reconfigurable and multicore heterogeneous platforms
Abstract The potential computational power of today
multicore processors has drastically improved compared to
the single processor architecture. Since the trend of
increasing the processor frequency is almost over, the
competition for increased performance has moved on the
number of cores. Consequently, the fundamental feature of
system designs and their associated design flows and tools
need to change, so that, to support the scalable parallelism
and the design portability. The same feature can be
exploited to design reconfigurable hardware, such as
FPGAs, which leads to rethink the mapping of sequential
algorithms to HDL. The sequential programming paradigm,
widely used for programming single processor systems,
does not naturally provide explicit or implicit forms
of scalable parallelism. Conversely, dataflow programming
is an approach that naturally provides parallelism and the
potential to unify SW and HDL designs on heterogeneous
platforms. This study describes a dataflow-based design
methodology aiming at a unified co-design and co-synthesis
of heterogeneous systems. Experimental results on
the implementation of a JPEG codec and a MPEG 4 SP
decoder on heterogeneous platforms demonstrate the flexibility
and capabilities of this design approach.
Keywords Dataflow FPGA HW/SW co-design
Co-synthesis Multicore computing Openforge
ORCC RVC-CAL