A Multiprocessor Prototype and Its SoC Design Methodology

Fast development of embedded application drives the SoC design more complex.How to design multiprocessor SoC efficiently and reliably is becoming a challenge to the designers.To address this challenge,a new multiprocessor prototype and its SoC design methodology are proposed in this paper.It combines multi processors and their communication into one software-hardware prototype in different abstraction levels.The method of seamless refinement from high level abstraction to low level VLSI implementation can design and verify the software/hardware interface and improve designing software/hardware architecture efficiently.The experiment of H.264 decoder shows the feasibility of multiprocessor prototype in both function and physical implementation.The seamless refinement method based on this prototype can ensure the correctness of SoC design and be helpful for its software/hardware architecture optimization.