Early analysis tools for system-on-a-chip design

The paper describes the need for early analysis tools to enable developers of today's system-on-a-chip (SoC) designs to take advantage of pre-designed components, such as those found in the IBM Blue Logic(R) Library, and rapidly explore high-level design alternatives to meet their system requirements. We report on a new approach for developing high-level performance models for these SoC designs and outline how this performance analysis capability can be integrated into an overall environment for efficient SoC design.