The work presented in this thesis targets the analysis and implementation of multi-criteria performance prediction methods for System-on-Chips (SoC).
These new SoC architectures offer the opportunity to integrate complete heterogeneous
systems into a single chip and can be used to design battery powered handhelds, security
critical systems, consumer electronics devices, etc. However, this variety in terms of application
usually comes with a lot of different performance objectives like power consumption,
yield, design cost, production cost, silicon area and many others. These performance requirements
are often very difficult to meet together so that SoC design usually relies on
making the right design choices and finding the best performance compromises.
In parallel with this architectural paradigm shift, new Very Deep Submicron (VDSM)
silicon processes have more and more impact on the performances and deeply modify the
way a VLSI system is designed even at the first stages of a design flow.
In such a context where many new technological and system related variables enter
the game, early exploration of the impact of design choices becomes crucial to estimate
the performance of the system to design and reduce its time-to-market.
In this context, this thesis presents:
- A study of state-of-the-art tools and methods used to estimate the performances of
VLSI systems and an original classification based on several features and concepts
that they use. Based on this comparison, we highlight their weaknesses and lacks to
identify new opportunities in performance prediction.
- The definition of new concepts to enable the automatic exploration of large design
spaces based on flexible performance criteria and degrees of freedom representing
design choices.
- The implementation of a couple of two new tools of our own:
- Nessie, a tool enabling hierarchical representation of an application along with
its platform and automatically performs the mapping and the estimation of
their performance.
-Yeti, a C++ library enabling the defintion and value estimation of closed-formed
expressions and table-based relations. It provides the user with input
and model sensitivity analysis capability, simulation scripting, run-time building
and automatic plotting of the results. Additionally, Yeti can work in standalone mode to provide the user with an independent framework for model estimation and analysis.
To demonstrate the use and interest of these tools, we provide in this thesis several
case studies whose results are discussed and compared with the literature.
Using Yeti, we successfully reproduced the results of a model estimating multi-core
computation power and extended them thanks to the representation flexibility of our tool.
We also built several models from the ground up to help the dimensioning of interconnect
links and clock frequency optimization.
Thanks to Nessie, we were able to reproduce the NoC power consumption results of
an H.264/AVC decoding application running on a multicore platform. These results were
then extended to the case of a 3D die stacked architecture and the performance benets
are then discussed.
We end up by highlighting the advantages of our technique and discuss future opportunities
for performance prediction tools to explore.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BICfB/oai:ulb.ac.be:ETDULB:ULBetd-03272009-115201 |
| Date | 23 March 2009 |
| Creators | Vander Biest, Alexis GJE |
| Contributors | Verkest Diederik, Le Moullec Yannick, Mathys Pierre, Robert Frédéric, Diguet Jean-Philippe, François Horlin, Milojevic Dragomir |
| Publisher | Universite Libre de Bruxelles |
| Source Sets | Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de la Communauté française de Belgique |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://theses.ulb.ac.be/ETD-db/collection/available/ULBetd-03272009-115201/ |
| Rights | restricted, J'accepte que le texte de la thèse (ci-après l'oeuvre), sous réserve des parties couvertes par la confidentialité, soit publié dans le recueil électronique des thèses ULB. A cette fin, je donne licence à ULB : - le droit de fixer et de reproduire l'oeuvre sur support électronique : logiciel ETD/db - le droit de communiquer l'oeuvre au public Cette licence, gratuite et non exclusive, est valable pour toute la durée de la propriété littéraire et artistique, y compris ses éventuelles prolongations, et pour le monde entier. Je conserve tous les autres droits pour la reproduction et la communication de la thèse, ainsi que le droit de l'utiliser dans de futurs travaux. Je certifie avoir obtenu, conformément à la législation sur le droit d'auteur et aux exigences du droit à l'image, toutes les autorisations nécessaires à la reproduction dans ma thèse d'images, de textes, et/ou de toute oeuvre protégés par le droit d'auteur, et avoir obtenu les autorisations nécessaires à leur communication à des tiers. Au cas où un tiers est titulaire d'un droit de propriété intellectuelle sur tout ou partie de ma thèse, je certifie avoir obtenu son autorisation écrite pour l'exercice des droits mentionnés ci-dessus. |
Page generated in 0.0035 seconds