Kaiserslautern - Fachbereich Elektrotechnik und Informationstechnik
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Hardware prototyping is an essential part in the hardware design flow. Furthermore, hardware prototyping usually relies on system-level design and hardware-in-the-loop simulations in order to develop, test and evaluate intellectual property cores. One common task in this process consist on interfacing cores with different port specifications. Data width conversion is used to overcome this issue. This work presents two open source hardware cores compliant with AXI4-Stream bus protocol, where each core performs upsizing/downsizing data width conversion.
Investigate the hardware description language Chisel - A case study implementing the Heston model
(2013)
This paper presents a case study comparing the hardware description language „Constructing Hardware in a Scala Embedded Language“(Chisel) to VHDL. For a thorough comparison the Heston Model was implemented, a stochastic model used in financial mathematics to calculate option prices. Metrics like hardware utilization and maximum clock rate were extracted from both resulting designs and compared to each other. The results showed a 30% reduction in code size compared to VHDL, while the resulting circuits had about the same hardware utilization. Using Chisel however proofed to be difficult because of a few features that were not available for this case study.
Chisel (Constructing Hardware in a Scala embedded language) is a new programming language, which embedded in Scala, used for hardware synthesis. It aims to increase productivity when creating hardware by enabling designers to use features present in higher level programming languages to build complex hardware blocks. In this paper, the most advertised features of Chisel are investigated and compared to their VHDL counterparts, if present. Afterwards, the authors’ opinion if a switch to Chisel is worth considering is presented. Additionally, results from a related case study on Chisel are briefly summarized. The author concludes that, while Chisel has promising features, it is not yet ready for use in the industry.
This work shall provide a foundation for the cross-design of wireless networked control systems with limited resources. A cross-design methodology is devised, which includes principles for the modeling, analysis, design, and realization of low cost but high performance and intelligent wireless networked control systems. To this end, a framework is developed in which control algorithms and communication protocols are jointly designed, implemented, and optimized taking into consideration the limited communication, computing, memory, and energy resources of the low performance, low power, and low cost wireless nodes used. A special focus of the proposed methodology is on the prediction and minimization of the total energy consumption of the wireless network (i.e. maximization of the lifetime of wireless nodes) under control performance constraints (e.g. stability and robustness) in dynamic environments with uncertainty in resource availability, through the joint (offline/online) adaptation of communication protocol parameters and control algorithm parameters according to the traffic and channel conditions. Appropriate optimization approaches that exploit the structure of the optimization problems to be solved (e.g. linearity, affinity, convexity) and which are based on Linear Matrix Inequalities (LMIs), Dynamic Programming (DP), and Genetic Algorithms (GAs) are investigated. The proposed cross-design approach is evaluated on a testbed consisting of a real lab plant equipped with wireless nodes. Obtained results show the advantages of the proposed cross-design approach compared to standard approaches which are less flexible.