The Multicube Design Flow

This chapter introduces the design-flow of the MULTICUBE project whose main goal is the definition of an automatic multi-objective Design Space Exploration (DSE) framework to be used to tune the parameters of System-on-Chip architectures by taking into account the target set of metrics (e.g. energy, latency, throughput, etc.). One of the important goals of the automatic multi-objective DSE framework is to find design trade-offs that best meet system constraints and cost criteria which are indeed strongly dependent on the target application. A set of heuristic optimisation algorithms have been defined to reduce the overall optimization time by identifying an approximated Pareto set of parameter configurations with respect to a set of selected figures of merit. Once the approximated Pareto set is built, the designer can quickly apply decision criteria to select the best configuration satisfying the constraints. The DSE flow is based on the interaction of two frameworks to be used at design time: the Design Space Exploration Framework, a set of open-source and proprietary architectural exploration tools, and the Power/Performance Estimation Framework, a set of modeling and simulation tools (open-source and proprietary) operating at several levels of abstraction. The DSE flow also includes the specification of an XML integration interface to connect the exploration and estimation frameworks and a Run-time Resource Manager exploiting, at run-time, the best software configuration alternatives derived at design-time to optimize the usage of system resources.