Eliminate Distributed System Design Risks with Early System Exploration
Performance analysis and early architecture exploration minimizes new technology adoption risks and optimizes the resulting system specification. Early design exploration can validate the specification for performance, power and functionality at an accuracy of 85-90% of the real system. Design Explorations early in the design flow reduces development time by over 30%, reduces implementation re-spins, and ensures that the required performance, power, functionality, and cost metrics are achieved.
Current system architecture exploration approaches take too long, require a lot of custom development, and are not very reusable. Architecture explorations using an analytical approach, such as spreadsheets, have a very limited exploration scope and are prone to errors due to their deterministic and non-graphical nature. Physical prototypes can take a long time to evaluate, and can only be validated for hardware-specific test cases.
System designer or an architect has to consider their design decisions in terms of hardware, software, peripherals and operating environment. As requirements for each side are different, the graphical environment provides a common platform for communication and development. A visual prototype to capture the performance and architecture of the distributed system must contain timing functions, traffic generators, network protocols, hardware components, software device driver models, and statistics generators to accurately capture the intended functionality. A graphical architecture analysis environment can quickly explore dozens of user generated scenarios, different network configurations and topologies, and sharing processing resources across multiple applications. This will enable the system architect to size hardware configuration, allocate and assign slots to devices, select number of active stars and partition the software into the optimal number of threads.
VisualSim a modeling and simulation software tool from Mirabilis Design assist designers to explore the architecture and optimize the specification without too many implementation restrictions. Studies have shown that exploration at this early stage can reduce power consumptions by close to 98%. Moreover, macro-architecture changes such as reducing the number of AXI buses between a camera interface and the DDR Controller can only be achieved this early in the design cycle.