Computer-Aided Design Tools for Single-Chip Multiprocessor Systems

Don Thomas, Electrical and Computer Engineering

Computing systems are becoming heterogeneous multiprocessors with the potential for the integration of on the order of a hundred (ARM-equivalent) processing elements on a single chip. Early examples of these are new products such as Sony/Toshiba/IBM's Cell processor. More application specific examples would be advanced cell phones and TV set-top boxes. Our vision is to better aid their design through new modeling and simulation approaches. Toward this end, an experimental simulator has been developed that models the performance of concurrent software tasks running on heterogeneous multiprocessors, including the software schedulers. (See http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~mesh.)

There are several projects that might be of interest here, these include: assertion-based verification within this simulation environment, parallelized simulated annealing as part of a newly developing synthesis process, comparing the accuracy of implemented systems (e.g., FPGAs) to those predicted by the tool. and using front-end design languages such as SystemVerilog.