Virtual Architecture Mapping: A SystemC Based Methodology for Architectural Exploration of System-on-Chip Designs

The ever increasing complexity and heterogeneity of modern System-on-Chip designs demands early consideration and exploration of architectural alternatives, which is hardly practicable on the low abstraction level of implementation models. In this paper, a system level design methodology based on the SystemC 2.0.1 library is proposed, which enables the designer to reason about the architecture on a much higher level of abstraction. Goal of this methodology is to define a system architecture, which provides sufficient performance, flexibility and cost efficiency as required by demanding applications like broadband networking or wireless communications. The methodology also provides capabilities for co-simulating multiple levels of abstraction simultaneously. This enables reuse of the simulation environment for functional verification of synthesizable implementation models against the abstract architecture model. During a industrial case study, this methodology is applied to the development of a 2.5 GB IP forwarding chip with Quality-of-Service (QoS) support. In this paper we share our experiences with special emphasis on the architecture exploration phase, where several architectural alternatives are evaluated with respect to their impact on the system performance.