Section: New Results

Development of a flexible heterogeneous system-on-chip platform using a mix of programmable processing elements and hardware accelerators

Participants : Paul-Antoine Arras, Emmanuel Jeannot, Samuel Thibault.

• Today's embedded applications are increasingly demanding in terms of computational power, especially in real-time digital signal processing (DSP) where tight timing requirements are to be fulfilled. More specifically, when it comes to video decoding (e.g. H.264/AVC) not only has it been almost impossible for some time to run such codecs on a stand-alone embedded processor, but it now also becomes quite impractical to execute them on homogeneous multicore platforms. In this context, STMicroelectronics is developing a scalable heterogeneous system-on-chip template called P2012 and aimed at meeting the latest codecs' requirements.`

• This year, the privileged axis of research was directed towards dataflow-based models, which benefit from such strong, well-known properties as analyzability, schedulability and expressivity. Furthermore, dataflow programming has already been used extensively in DSP, yielding a number of dedicated software synthesis tools. We have proposed a first version of the programming model that will be evaluated later.