Making the Right Architectural Decisions

Overview

Understanding what your system really needs to do before you build it is fundamental to success in developing today's complex systems. Architectural design is the task carried out by the system architects and SoC designers who need to partition, integrate and optimize complex systems with demanding power and performance constraints.

During the platform design process decisions need to be made related to hardware software partitioning, processor selection, interconnect and memory hierarchies, fabric infrastructures and caching strategies. These decisions have dramatic effects on the RTL that would be implemented for a system. Some level of detailed analysis of the effects of the decisions must be made to ensure the right architecture is implemented in RTL, by the time the RTL is developed it is often too late to change the fundamental architecture.

To address these issues system level design techniques are being used to create Transaction Level Models, TLMs, of the system that allow designers to make intelligent decisions between implementation choices before committing to the architectural choices in an RTL implementation.

In this session we will walk through a architectural design example to learn the value of doing system level analysis.

Some of the steps include:

• Creation of a system level transaction model
• Simulation of the TLM to approximate system processing and traffic
• Debug the platform to achieve confidence that it is appropriately modeling the system activity
• Analysis of the system to identify bottlenecks and potential tradeoffs in performance and power consumption

What You Will Learn

• Understand what an transaction level model is and how to create an initial platform
• Identify some of the tradeoffs that can be made at the transaction level

Who Should View

• System Engineers
• System Designers
• Project Leads
• Those who are responsible for the hardware tradeoffs within a system