Floorplan, clock network and power plan are crucial steps in deep sub-micron system-on-chip design. A novel di- agonal floorplan is integrated to enhance the data sharing between different cores in system-on-chip. Custom clock network con- taining hand-adjusted buffers and variable routing rules is constructed to realize balanced synchronization. Effective power plan considering both IR drop and electromigration achieves high utilization and maintains power integrity in our MediaSoC. Using such methods, deep sub-micron design challenges are managed under a fast prototyping methodology, which greatly shortens the design cycle.
In order to improve the efficiency of embedded software running on processor core, this paper proposes a hard-ware/software co-optimization approach for embedded software from the system point of view. The proposed stepwise methods aim at exploiting the structure and the resources of the processor as much as possible for software algorithm optimization. To achieve low memory usage and low frequency need for the same performance, this co-optimization approach was used to optimize embedded software of MP3 decoder based on a 16-bit fixed-point DSP core. After the optimization, the results of decoding 128 kbps, 44.1 kHz stereo MP3 on DSP evaluation platform need 45.9 MIPS and 20.4 kbytes memory space. The optimization rate achieves 65.6% for memory and 49.6% for frequency respectively compared with the results by compiler using floating-point computation. The experimental result indicates the availability of the hardware/software co-optimization approach depending on the algorithm and architecture.
