Section: Software

Keywords : circuit design, architecture synthesis, low-power consumption, placement.

BSS, BOOST

Participants : Daniel Chillet [ contact ] , Sébastien Pillement, Olivier Sentieys.

The BSS (Breizh Synthesis System ) software platform for circuit design proposes a set of tools for the capture of application description (in VHDL or in C), the compilation, the simulation and the synthesis of architecture.

The platform is currently composed of the following modules.

• A set of programs (C and VHDL compilers, selection, scheduling, code generation) allowing the synthesis of circuits.

• Graphic interfaces, PUDesigner and GFDesigner , allowing the visualization and the handling of the data flow graphs and architectures.

• A tool for power estimation at the architectural level, PowerCheck , operating from the architectures generated by the synthesis. It also uses as an input a file of parameters which makes it possible to characterize the technology of the circuit and the physical capacities of the chips. The signal can be specified in two different ways: either by its probabilities according to a model (white noise, DBT), or in the form of a file of vectors from which are extracted the probabilistic characteristics. As output, PowerCheck provides a report indicating the average powers dissipated by each part of the control and processing units. PowerCheck also gives the dissipated powers cycle by cycle by the various modules.

• A tool for area and delay interconnection estimation, Jfloorplanner , operating at the architectural level. The input of the tool consists of a netlist generated by BSS. This netlist contains the whole of information related to the components and their interconnections. The tool provides indications concerning the final area of the floorplan, the length of the interconnections as well as the interconnection delays related to these lengths. A display of the estimated floorplan is available and can be used in order to carry out quickly the place and route step with standard cao tools.

BOOST (Breizh Object Oriented Synthesis Tools) is an evolution of the BSS platform whose main objective is to facilitate the integration of new modules in the synthesis flow.

A global XML application defines the module list and the installation location. For each module, an XML application defines how the module has to be described to be included in the Boost platform. Several simple synthesis steps have been included in Boost. This platform was used as a demonstrator for the OSGAR project during the RNTL days in October 2004 in Rennes. Boost is developed in Java language and can be installed on solaris, windows or linux platforms.

To know some more, contact Daniel Chillet.