Application specific systems have potential for customization of design with a view to achieve a better costperformance-power trade-off. Such customization requires extensive design space exploration. In this paper, we introduce a performance evaluation methodology for system-level design exploration that is much faster than traditional cycleaccurate simulation. The trade off is between accuracy and simulation speed. The methodology is based on probabilistic modeling of system components customized with application behavior. Performance numbers are generated by simulating these models. We have implemented our models using SystemC and validated these for uni-processor as well as multiprocessor systems against various benchmarks. Categories and Subject Descriptors C.3 [Special-purpose and Application-based Systems]: Real-time and embedded systems; C.4 [Performance of Systems]: Modeling techniques, measurement techniques General Terms Performance, Design, Experimentation Keywords Desi...
M. Balakrishnan, Anshul Kumar, C. P. Joshi