Talk Hybrid Prototyping of Multi-core Embedded Systems by Samar Abdi

Date
Location

ICCSX836

Abstract

Pre-silicon performance and power analysis of multi-core embedded systems is a serious challenge. Conventional technologies such as virtual prototyping and physical prototyping have several limitations. Virtual prototypes, based on host-compiled instruction-set simulators, can provide high simulation speed, but at the expense of limited or no timing accuracy. Physical prototypes, based on instantiation and integration of processor cores in FPGA, provide cycle accuracy, but with the disadvantage of high development cost and lack of scalability. In addition, there is no flexibility of abstracting communication in physical prototypes, since it is fixed in hardware. Furthermore, software debugging on multiple processors in FPGA can be challenging. In this talk, I will present a novel modeling technique for multi-core embedded systems, called Hybrid Prototyping. The fundamental idea is to simulate a design with multiple processor cores by creating an emulation kernel in software on top of a single physical instance of the processor core. The emulation kernel switches between tasks mapped to different cores and manages the logical simulation times of the individual processor cores. As a result, we can achieve fast and cycle-level simulation of multi-core embedded systems, thereby overcoming the accuracy concerns of virtual prototyping and the scalability issues of physical prototyping. Our experiments show that the simulation time with hybrid prototypes grows only linearly with the number of cores and the inter-core communication traffic, while providing cycle accuracy.

Bio

Samar Abdi is an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. He received his PhD in Computer Science from University of California, Irvine (UCI) and B.Tech. in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Kharagpur. From 2005 to 2009, he was an Assistant Project Scientist at UCI, leading a project on Embedded System Modeling as part of the Giga-Scale Systems Research Center. From 1998 to 2000, he was a member of technical staff at Cadence Design Systems, working on logic simulation tools. He has co-authored a book on Embedded System Design and over 40 peer-reviewed conference and journal papers.

Contact

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Concordia University, Montreal,1455 de Maisonneuve Ouest, S-EV 5.139, Montreal, QC H3G 1M8.

Ph: 514-848-2424 extn. 3093.

Fax: 514-848-2802

Email: samar@ece.concordia.ca

Web: http://users.encs.concordia.ca/~samar/


Find more undergrad events on our internal portal at https://my.cs.ubc.ca.

This event's address: https://my.cs.ubc.ca/event/2015/08/talk-hybrid-prototyping-multi-core-embedded