FABSYN: floorplan-aware bus architecture synthesis

As system-on-chip (SoC) designs become more complex, it is becoming harder to design communication architectures to handle the ever increasing volumes of inter-component communication. Manual traversal of the vast communication design space to synthesize a communication architecture that meets performance requirements becomes infeasible. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing an automated approach for floorplan-aware bus architecture synthesis (FABSYN) to synthesize cost-effective, bus-based communication architectures that satisfy the performance constraints in a design. Our synthesis approach incorporates a high-level floorplanning and wire delay estimation engine to evaluate the feasibility of the synthesized bus architecture and detect bus cycle time violations early in the design flow, at the system level. We present case studies of network communication SoC subsystems for which we synthesized bus architectures, detected and eliminated timing violations, and generated core placements in a matter of hours instead of several days for a manual effort.