New approach to architectural synthesis: incorporating QoS constraint

Embedded applications like video decoding, video streaming and those in the network domain, typically have a Quality of Service (QoS) requirement which needs to be met. Apart from being a design constraint, it can also be considered as a flexibility that the design does not have to work under worst case data condition. For example, in the case of video decoding with variable decoding time for individual frames, it may be adequate that only a fraction of frames (say 90%) needs to be decoded. In this work, we propose a novel method of exploiting this flexibility for efficient partitioning and mapping in the architectural synthesis of the application at hand. We translate QoS specification of the overall application to the time constraint on the individual components constituting the application and use this knowledge in an optimum synthesis technique based on Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP). We study this in the context of MPEG2 Decoder and show that the approach can be used to ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: EMSOFT
• Authors: Harsh Dhand, Basant Kumar Dwivedi, M. Balakrishnan
• Keywords: EMSOFT 2006, Software Engineering, Time Constraints, Variable Decoding Time, Video Decoding