RAPTOR-Design: Refactorable Architecture Processor to Optimize Recurrent Design

Paulo Garcia, Tiago Gomes, Filipe Salgado, Jorge Cabral, João Monteiro, Adriano Tavares

Abstract: The growth in embedded systems complexity has created the demand for novel tools which allow rapid systems development and facilitate the designer's management of complexity. Especially since systems must incorporate a variety of often contradictory characteristics, achieving design metrics in short development time is an increasing challenge. This paper presents RAPTOR-Design, a framework for System-on-Chip (SoC) design which incorporates a customizable processor architecture and allows rapid software-to-hardware migration, custom hardware integration in a tightly-coupled fashion and seamless Fault Tolerance (FT) capabilities for FPGA platforms. Impact on design metrics of processor customization, FT-capabilities and custom hardware integration are presented, as well as an overview of the design process using RAPTOR-Design.