A virtual model for simulation and design of architectures in MPEG-4 audio and multimedia context

Research in multimedia for consumer electronics is dominated by the problem of incredibly short times-to-market, that means fast complexity estimations and fast design of new architectures. On one side more and more sophisticated and flexible applications are rapidly developed, on the other side the exponential growth in IC computational power seems to be hardly capable to keep pace with requirements for real-time applications, since their complexity is exponentially growing as well. The processor's performance, often slowed down by bottlenecks in memories and buses, is further reduced by the time wasted in communication among the several application layers. From this problem comes the conception of integrated development frameworks for simulation and design. Tools for simulation and analysis of architectures have appeared from academic and industrial research laboratories above all in the last decade. Many of them are conceived to provide low-level exact simulation of the supported devices, at the price of heavy slowdowns in simulation times and huge sizes of traced data reports. Some others, in the last years, introduced some degrees of approximation in simulations, in order to speed up execution time and to increase the flexibility of the tools to support multi-processors. The resulting more or less abstract models are anyway not suitable to analyze real multimedia-oriented applications, where programs are usually available in some languages including dedicated libraries and meaningful results are only those measured in function of time. On another level, tools for hardware/software codesign or for block-based system design provide more useful results, but to be effective they must rely on rigid cores that may allow only a few degrees of reconfigurability; some very recent tools are conceived to design complex systems by modeling blocks through a high level description language. Conversely, the virtual model and related tool proposed in this dissertation have their roots in an approach to the analysis of complexity that aims to be, as far as possible, platform independent. The method is based on the concepts of abstract classes of operations and simulation in function of the performance time. The work described in this dissertation finds its application field in the world of multimedia, more precisely in multimedia-oriented Audio applications. Media applications are commonly programmed by imperative or object-oriented languages, which are composed by many different statements, operators and above all standard libraries. A careful profiling of typical applications permits to detect fundamental operations and functions and to define a virtual instruction set, grouping more or less similar operators and breaking functions into basic building blocks. The resulting virtual instruction set does not correspond to any actual one but it has as property to be easily mapped on a large number of existing ones. The simulation of an architecture requires th