abstract = "With the increasing of complexity and performance
demand of embedded systems, as well as with the
reduction of microprocessors cost, embedded systems
designers have considered multiprocessors systems as
the solutions for their applications. The improvement
of the integration technologies made it possible to
integrate billions of transistors onto a single chip.
As an embedded microprocessor is composed by a few
million transistors, ten or more microprocessors can be
integrated into a single chip to form a Multi-Processor
System-on-Chip (MPSoC). In the development of these
systems, designers have to specify and validate the
behaviour of the system application prior to final
implementation, by using executable functional models
and testbench structures. Approaches, such as Platform
Based Design (PBD), have considered platform components
reuse and abstract models at the system level as good
practices to simplify and turn more dynamic the process
of developing MPSoCs, thereby increasing the designers
productivity. In this approach, the system in
development is initially specified using a high level
description, which will gradually be refined down to
the final implementation in hardware. The system
functions described in the initial specification are
selected to be implemented in software or in hardware
components. These components compose an architecture
known as a platform, which can be modified and adapted
to meet the application constraints. MPSoCs are
composed by many processing components that implement
concurrent communicating processes, so the on-chip
communication architecture must meet the applications
communication requirements. Thus, while there are
several studies focusing on the partitioning/mapping
processes, comparatively few research projects have
addressed the communication analysis problem to support
the design of systems, including efficient
communication architectures. Some existing techniques
to explore the configuration options of the
communication structure are inaccurate, since they
perform static estimates and do not take into account
the dynamic effects of architecture, such as bus
contention, or they are inefficient, since they have to
simulate each configuration of the design space. This
work aims to support communication analysis in the
selection and refinement of communication architectures
in the design of multi-processors systems, considering
that the application has been partitioned and mapped to
a platform, according to the PBD approach. By using the
proposed approach, designer can have accurate estimates
of the performance of the bus-based communication
architecture for the entire design space, and, hence,
can select a configuration that meets the communication
constraints of the system.",