An Evaluation of the Predictable System-on-a-Chip Automated System Design Flow

Abstract: In spite of hard real-time embedded systems often being seemingly simple, modern embedded system designs often incorporate features such as multiple processors and complex inter-processor communication. In situations where safety is critical, such as in for instance many automotive applications, great demand is put on developers to prove correctness. The ForSyDe research project aims to remedy this problem by providing a design philosophy based on the theory of models of computation which aims to formally ensure predictability and correctness by design. A system designed with the ForSyDe design methodology consists of a well defined system model which can be refined by design transformations until it is mappable onto an application specific predictable hardware template. This thesis evaluates one such hardware template called the predictable System-on-a-Programmable-Chip. This hardware template was developed during the work on a masters thesis by Marcus Mikulcak [7] in 2013. The evaluation was done by creating many simple dual processor systems using the automated design flow provided by PSOPC. Using these systems, the time to communicate data between the processors was measured and compared against the claims made in [7]. The results presented in this thesis suggests that the current implementation of the PSOPC platform is not yet mature enough for production use. Data collected from many different configurations show that many of the generated systems exhibit unacceptable anomalies. Some systems would not start at all, and some systems could not communicate the data properly. Although this thesis does not propose solutions to the problems found herein, it serves to show that further work on the PSOPC platform is necessary before it can be incorporated into the larger context of the ForSyDe platform. However, it is the author’s genuine hope that the reader will gain appreciation for PSOPC as an idea, and that this work can instil interest into further working on perfecting it, so that it can serve as a part of ForSyDe in the future.