Partitioning methodology validation for embedded systems design

Abstract: As modern embedded systems are becoming more sophisticated the demands on their applications significantly increase. A current trend is to utilize the advances of heterogeneous platforms (i.e. platform consisting of different computational units (e.g. CPU, FPGA or GPU)) where different parts of the application can be distributed among the different computational units as software and hardware implementations. This technology can improve the application characteristics to meet requirements (e.g. execution time, power consumption and design cost), but it leads to a new challenge in finding the best combination of hardware and software implementation (referred as system configuration). The decisions whether a part of the application should be implemented in software (e.g. as C code) or hardware (e.g. as VHDL code) affect the entire product life-cycle. This is traditionally done manually by the developers in the early stage of the design phase. However, due to the increasing complexity of the application the need of a systematic process that aids the developer when making these decisions to meet the demands rises. Prior to this work a methodology called MULTIPAR has been designed to address this problem. MULTIPAR applies component-/model-based techniques to design the application, i.e. the application is modeled as a number of interconnected components, where some of the components will be implemented as software and the remaining ones as hardware. To perform the partitioning decisions, i.e. determining for each component whether it should be implemented as software or hardware, MULTIPAR proposes a set of formulas to calculate the properties of the entire system based on the properties for each component working in isolation. This thesis aims to show to what extent the proposed system formulas are valid. In particular it focuses on validating the formulas that calculate the system response time, system power consumption, system static memory and system FPGA area. The formulas were validated trough an industrial case study, where the system properties for different system configurations were measured and calculated by applying these formulas. The measured values and calculated values for the system properties were compared by conducting a statistical analysis. The case study demonstrated that the system properties can be accurately calculated by applying the system formulas.