A known approach to improve the timing accuracy of an untimed or loosely timed TLM model is to add timing annotations into the code and to reduce the number of costly context switches using temporal decoupling, meaning that a process can go ahead of the simulation time before synchronizing again. Our current goal is to apply temporal decoupling to the TLM platform of a heterogeneous many-core SoC dedicated to high performance computing. Part of this SoC communicates using classic memory-mapped buses, but it can be extended with hardware accelerators communicating using FIFOs. Whereas temporal decoupling for memory-based transactions has been widely studied, FIFO-based communications raise issues that have not been addressed before. In this paper, we provide an efficient solution to combine temporal decoupling and FIFO-based communications.

A joint algorithm-architecture analysis leads to a new version of picture segmentation system adapted to multimedia mobile terminal constraints. The asynchronous processors network, with a granularity level of one processor per pixel, based on data flow model, takes less than 10 /spl mu/s to segment a SQCIF $88*72 pixels - image (about 2000 times faster than the classical sequential watershed algorithms). The main originality of the proposed algorithm is only one global synchronization point is needed in order to complete the segmentation transformation, instead of the three (or more) classical points: minima detection, labelization and flooding. Our system tends to cope with multimedia mobile phones constraints, i.e. real time computing circuit, low power. We have simulated and validated this system thanks to "SystemC" library; VHDL synchronous prototyping shows up results accordingly.