Component interconnect and data access interface for embedded vision applications

摘要

IP-based design is used to tackle complexity and reduce time-to-market in systems-on-chip with high-performance requirements. Component integration, the main part in this process, is a complicated and time-consuming task, largely due to interfacing issues. Standard interfaces can help to reduce the integration efforts. However, existing implementations use more resources than necessary and lack of a formalism to capture and manipulate resource requirements and design constraints. In this paper, we propose a novel interface, the Component Interconnect and Data Access (CIDA), and its implementation, based on the interface automata formalism. CIDA can be used to capture system-on-chip architecture, with primarily focus on video processing applications, which are mostly based on data streaming paradigm, with occasional direct memory accesses. We introduce the notion of component-interface clustering for resource reduction and provide a method to automatize this process. With real-life video processing applications implemented in FPGA, we show that our approach can reduce the resource usage (#slices) by an average of 20% and reduce power consumption by 5% compared to implementation based on vendor interfaces.