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Towards the Efficient Creation of Accurate and High-Performance Virtual Prototypes

  • As the complexity of embedded systems continuously rises, their development becomes more and more challenging. One technique to cope with this complexity is the employment of virtual prototypes. The virtual prototypes are intended to represent the embedded system’s properties on different levels of detail like register transfer level or transaction level. Virtual prototypes can be used for different tasks throughout the development process. They can act as executable specification, can be used for architecture exploration, can ease system integration, and allow for pre- and post-silicon software development and verification. The optimization objectives for virtual prototypes and their creation process are manifold. Finding an appropriate trade-off between the simulation accuracy, the simulation performance, and the implementation effort is a major challenge, as these requirements are contradictory. In this work, two new and complementary techniques for the efficient creation of accurate and high-performance SystemC based virtual prototypes are proposed: Advanced Temporal Decoupling (ATD) and Transparent Transaction Level Modeling (TTLM). The suitability for industrial environments is assured by the employment of common standards like SystemC TLM-2.0 and IP-XACT. Advanced Temporal Decoupling enhances the simulation accuracy while retaining high simulation performance by allowing for cycle accurate simulation in the context of SystemC TLM-2.0 temporal decoupling. This is achieved by exploiting the local time warp arising in SystemC TLM-2.0 temporal decoupled models to support the computation of resource contention effects. In ATD, accesses to shared resource are managed by Temporal Decoupled Semaphores (TDSems) which are integrated into the modeled shared resources. The set of TDSems assures the correct execution order of shared resource accesses and incorporates timing effects resulting from shared resource access execution and resource conflicts. This is done by dynamically varying the data granularity of resource accesses based on information gathered from the local time warp. ATD facilitates modeling of a wide range of resource and resource access properties like preemptable and non-preemptable accesses, synchronous and asynchronous accesses, multiport resources, dynamic access priorities, interacting and cascaded resources, and user specified schedulers prioritizing simultaneous resource accesses. Transparent Transaction Level Modeling focuses on the efficient creation of virtual prototypes by reducing the implementation effort and consists of a library and a code generator. The TTLM library adds a layer of convenience functions to ATD comprising various application programming interfaces for inter module communication, virtual prototype configuration and run time information extraction. The TTLM generator is used to automatically generate the structural code of the virtual prototype from the formal hardware specification language IP-XACT. The applicability and benefits of the presented techniques are demonstrated using an image processing centric automotive application. Compared to an existing cycle accurate SystemC model, the implementation effort can be reduced by approximately 50% using TTLM. Applying ATD, the simulation performance can be increased by a factor of up to five while retaining cycle accuracy.

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Metadaten
Author:Simon Hufnagel
URN:urn:nbn:de:hbz:386-kluedo-38928
Advisor:Christoph Grimm, Oliver Bringmann
Document Type:Doctoral Thesis
Language of publication:English
Date of Publication (online):2014/10/08
Year of first Publication:2014
Publishing Institution:Technische Universität Kaiserslautern
Granting Institution:Technische Universität Kaiserslautern
Acceptance Date of the Thesis:2014/07/17
Date of the Publication (Server):2014/10/10
Tag:Code Generation; Cycle Accuracy; Discrete Event Simulation (DES); IP-XACT; Shared Resource Modeling; SystemC; Temporal Decoupling; Transaction Level Modeling (TLM)
Page Number:135
Faculties / Organisational entities:Kaiserslautern - Fachbereich Informatik
CCS-Classification (computer science):I. Computing Methodologies / I.6 SIMULATION AND MODELING (G.3) / I.6.1 Simulation Theory
I. Computing Methodologies / I.6 SIMULATION AND MODELING (G.3) / I.6.5 Model Development
DDC-Cassification:0 Allgemeines, Informatik, Informationswissenschaft / 004 Informatik
MSC-Classification (mathematics):03-XX MATHEMATICAL LOGIC AND FOUNDATIONS
Licence (German):Standard gemäß KLUEDO-Leitlinien vom 10.09.2012