Introducing energy and area estimation in HW/SW design flow based on transaction level modeling

Transaction Level Modeling (TLM) facilitates the system designer in decision making at early phases of electronic product development. Executable specifications obtained from TLM models are used for the exploration of various architectural parameters and configurations possible for a system. However, traditional design flows based on TLM don't take into account the area and energy consumption of the system which are inevitably the most important constraints in modern embedded system designs. Traditionally, area and energy estimation is incorporated in system design at RTL (Register Transfer Level) which comes later in system design cycles and most of the crucial design decisions for the system has already been taken at that stage. In this paper, we propose a methodology to incorporate area and energy estimation in TLM based system modeling. This methodology allows a system designer take system level design decisions in very early stages of system design hence avoiding redesign efforts and performance bottlenecks in advanced stages of a project. Results obtained by applying our methodology on an image processing application show the robustness of our approach.