This book describes a flexible and largely automated methodology for adding the estimation of power consumption to high level simulations at the electronic system level (ESL). This method enables the inclusion of power consumption considerations from the very start of a design. This ability can help designers of electronic systems to create devices with low power consumption. The authors also demonstrate the implementation of the method, using the popular ESL language "SystemC". This implementation enables most existing SystemC ESL simulations for power estimation with very little manual work. Extensive case-studies of a Network on Chip communication architecture and a dual-core application processor "ARM Cortex-A9" showcase the applicability and accuracy of the method to different types of electronic devices. The evaluation compares various trade-offs regarding amount of manual work, types of ESL models, achieved estimation accuracy and impact on the simulation speed. Describes a flexible and largely automated ESL power estimation method; Shows implementation of power estimation methodology in SystemC; Uses two extensive case studies to demonstrate method introduced.

This book provides embedded software developers with techniques for programming heterogeneous Multi-Processor Systems-on-Chip (MPSoCs), capable of executing multiple applications simultaneously. It describes a set of algorithms and methodologies to narrow the software productivity gap, as well as an in-depth description of the underlying problems and challenges of today’s programming practices. The authors present four different tool flows: A parallelism extraction flow for applications written using the C programming language, a mapping and scheduling flow for parallel applications, a special mapping flow for baseband applications in the context of Software Defined Radio (SDR) and a final flow for analyzing multiple applications at design time. The tool flows are evaluated on Virtual Platforms (VPs), which mimic different characteristics of state-of-the-art heterogeneous MPSoCs.

This book introduces a novel design methodology which can significantly reduce the ASIP development effort through high degrees of design automation. The key elements of this new design methodology are a powerful application profiler and an automated instruction-set customization tool which considerably lighten the burden of mapping a target application to an ASIP architecture in the initial design stages. The book includes several design case studies with real life embedded applications to demonstrate how the methodology and the tools can be used in practice for accelerating the overall ASIP design process.

This book gives a comprehensive introduction to the design challenges of MPSoC platforms, focusing on early design space exploration. It defines an iterative methodology to increase the abstraction level so that evaluation of design decisions can be performed earlier in the design process. These techniques enable exploration on the system level before undertaking time- and cost-intensive development.

Simulation of computer architectures has made rapid progress recently. The primary application areas are hardware/software performance estimation and optimization as well as functional and timing verification. Recent, innovative technologies such as retargetable simulator generation, dynamic binary translation, or sampling simulation have enabled widespread use of processor and system-on-chip (SoC) simulation tools in the semiconductor and embedded system industries. Simultaneously, processor and SoC simulation is still a very active research area, e.g. what amounts to higher simulation speed, flexibility, and accuracy/speed trade-offs. This book presents and discusses the principle technologies and state-of-the-art in high-level hardware architecture simulation, both at the processor and the system-on-chip level.

This book provides embedded software developers with techniques for programming heterogeneous Multi-Processor Systems-on-Chip (MPSoCs), capable of executing multiple applications simultaneously. It describes a set of algorithms and methodologies to narrow the software productivity gap, as well as an in-depth description of the underlying problems and challenges of today's programming practices. The authors present four different tool flows: A parallelism extraction flow for applications written using the C programming language, a mapping and scheduling flow for parallel applications, a special mapping flow for baseband applications in the context of Software Defined Radio (SDR) and a final flow for analyzing multiple applications at design time. The tool flows are evaluated on Virtual Platforms (VPs), which mimic different characteristics of state-of-the-art heterogeneous MPSoCs.

This book introduces a novel design methodology which can significantly reduce the ASIP development effort through high degrees of design automation. The key elements of this new design methodology are a powerful application profiler and an automated instruction-set customization tool which considerably lighten the burden of mapping a target application to an ASIP architecture in the initial design stages. The book includes several design case studies with real life embedded applications to demonstrate how the methodology and the tools can be used in practice for accelerating the overall ASIP design process.

This book gives a comprehensive introduction to the design challenges of MPSoC platforms, focusing on early design space exploration. It defines an iterative methodology to increase the abstraction level so that evaluation of design decisions can be performed earlier in the design process. These techniques enable exploration on the system level before undertaking time- and cost-intensive development.

Today more than 90% of all programmable processors are employed in embedded systems. This number is actually not surprising, contemplating that in a typical home you might find one or two PCs equipped with high-performance standard processors, and probably dozens of embedded systems, including electronic entertainment, household, and telecom devices, each of them equipped with one or more embedded processors. The question arises why programmable processors are so popular in embedded system design. The answer lies in the fact that they help to narrow the gap between chip capacity and designer productivity. Embedded processors cores are nothing but one step further towards improved design reuse, just along the lines of standard cells in logic synthesis and macrocells in RTL synthesis in earlier times of IC design. Additionally, programmable processors permit to migrate functionality from hardware to software, resulting in an even improved reuse factor as well as greatly increased flexibility.

The LISA processor design platform (LPDP) presented in Architecture Exploration for Embedded Processors with LISA addresses recent design challenges and results in highly satisfactory solutions. The LPDP covers all major high-level phases of embedded processor design and is capable of automatically generating almost all required software development tools from processor models in the LISA language. It supports a profiling-based, stepwise refinement of processor models down to cycle-accurate and even RTL synthesis models. Moreover, it elegantly avoids model inconsistencies otherwise omnipresent in traditional design flows.

The next step in design reuse is already in sight: SoC platforms, i.e., partially pre-designed multi-processor templates that can be quickly tuned towards given applications thereby guaranteeing a high degree of hardware/software reuse in system-level design. Consequently, the LPDP approach goes even beyond processor architecture design. The LPDP solution explicitly addresses SoC integration issues by offering comfortable APIs for external simulation environments as well as clever solutions for the problem of both efficient and user-friendly heterogeneous multiprocessor debugging.

According to market analysts, the market for consumer electronics will con tinue to grow at a rate higher than that of electronic systems in general. The consumer market can be characterized by rapidly growing complexities of appli cations and a rather short market window. As a result, more and more complex designs have to be completed in shrinking time frames. A key concept for coping with such stringent requirements is re-use. Since the re-use of completely fixed large hardware blocks is limited to subproblems of system-level applications (for example MPEG-2), flexible, programmable pro cessors are being used as building blocks for more and more designs. Processors provide a unique combination offeatures: they provide flexibility and re-use. The processors used in consumer electronics are, however, in many cases dif ferent from those that are used for screen and keyboard-based equipment, such as PCs. For the consumer market in particular, efficiency of the product plays a dominating role. Hence, processor architectures for these applications are usually highly-optimized and tailored towards a certain application domain."

It is well known that embedded systems have to be implemented efficiently. This requires that processors optimized for certain application domains are used in embedded systems. Such an optimization requires a careful exploration of the design space, including a detailed study of cost/performance tradeoffs. In order to avoid time-consuming assembly language programming during design space exploration, compilers are needed. In order to analyze the effect of various software or hardware configurations on the performance, retargetable compilers are needed that can generate code for numerous different potential hardware configurations. This book provides a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of the fast developing area of retargetable compilers for embedded systems. It describes a large set important tools as well as applications of retargetable compilers at different levels in the design flow. Retargetable Compiler Technology for Embedded Systems is mostly self-contained and requires only fundamental knowledge in software and compiler design. It is intended to be a key reference for researchers and designers working on software, compilers, and processor optimization for embedded systems.

Integrated System-Level Modeling of Network-on-Chip Enabled Multi-Processor Platforms first gives a comprehensive update on recent developments in the area of SoC platforms and ESL design methodologies. The main contribution is the rigorous definition of a framework for modeling at the timing approximate level of abstraction. Subsequently this book presents a set of tools for the creation and exploration of timing approximate SoC platform models.

The building blocks of today's and future embedded systems are complex intellectual property components, or cores, many of which are programmable processors. Traditionally, these embedded processors mostly have been pro grammed in assembly languages due to efficiency reasons. This implies time consuming programming, extensive debugging, and low code portability. The requirements of short time-to-market and dependability of embedded systems are obviously much better met by using high-level language (e.g. C) compil ers instead of assembly. However, the use of C compilers frequently incurs a code quality overhead as compared to manually written assembly programs. Due to the need for efficient embedded systems, this overhead must be very low in order to make compilers useful in practice. In turn, this requires new compiler techniques that take the specific constraints in embedded system de sign into account. An example are the specialized architectures of recent DSP and multimedia processors, which are not yet sufficiently exploited by existing compilers."

New software tools and a sophisticated methodology above RTL are required to answer the challenges of designing an optimized application specific processor (ASIP). This book offers an automated and fully integrated implementation flow and compares it to common implementation practice. It provides case-studies that emphasize that neither the architectural advantages nor the design space of ASIPs are sacrificed for an automated implementation.

Computerarchitecturepresentlyfacesanunprecedentedrevolution: Thestep from monolithic processors towards multi-core ICs, motivated by the ever - creasingneedforpowerandenergyef ciencyinnanoelectronics. Whetheryou prefer to call it MPSoC (multi-processor system-on-chip) or CMP (chip mul- processor), no doubt this revolution affects large domains of both computer science and electronics, and it poses many new interdisciplinary challenges. For instance, ef cient programming models and tools for MPSoC are largely an open issue: "Multi-core platforms are a reality - but where is the software support" (R. Lauwereins, IMEC). Solving it will require enormous research efforts as well as the education of a whole new breed of software engineers that bring the results from universities into industrial practice. Atthesametime, thedesignofcomplexMPSoCarchitecturesisanextremely time-consuming task, particularly in the wireless and multimedia application domains, where heterogeneous architectures are predominant. Due to the - ploding NRE and mask costs most companies are now following a platform approach: Invest a large (but one-time) design effort into a proper core - chitecture, and create easy-to-design derivatives for new standards or product features. Needless to say, only the most ef cient MPSoC platforms have a real chance to enjoy a multi-year lifetime on the highly competitive semiconductor market for embedded systems.

Increasing complexity of modern embedded systems demands system designers to ramp up their design productivity without compromising performance goals. This is promoted by modern Electronic System Level (ESL) techniques. Language-driven Exploration and Implementation of Partially Re-configurable ASIPs addresses an important segment of the ESL area by modeling partially re-configurable processors via high-level Architecture Description Language (ADL). This approach also hints an imminent evolution in the area of re-configurable system design.

It gives me immense pleasure to introduce this timely handbook to the research/- velopment communities in the ?eld of signal processing systems (SPS). This is the ?rst of its kind and represents state-of-the-arts coverage of research in this ?eld. The driving force behind information technologies (IT) hinges critically upon the major advances in both component integration and system integration. The major breakthrough for the former is undoubtedly the invention of IC in the 50's by Jack S. Kilby, the Nobel Prize Laureate in Physics 2000. In an integrated circuit, all components were made of the same semiconductor material. Beginning with the pocket calculator in 1964, there have been many increasingly complex applications followed. In fact, processing gates and memory storage on a chip have since then grown at an exponential rate, following Moore's Law. (Moore himself admitted that Moore's Law had turned out to be more accurate, longer lasting and deeper in impact than he ever imagined. ) With greater device integration, various signal processing systems have been realized for many killer IT applications. Further breakthroughs in computer sciences and Internet technologies have also catalyzed large-scale system integration. All these have led to today's IT revolution which has profound impacts on our lifestyle and overall prospect of humanity. (It is hard to imagine life today without mobiles or Internets ) The success of SPS requires a well-concerted integrated approach from mul- ple disciplines, such as device, design, and application.

Computerarchitecturepresentlyfacesanunprecedentedrevolution: Thestep from monolithic processors towards multi-core ICs, motivated by the ever - creasingneedforpowerandenergyef ciencyinnanoelectronics. Whetheryou prefer to call it MPSoC (multi-processor system-on-chip) or CMP (chip mul- processor), no doubt this revolution affects large domains of both computer science and electronics, and it poses many new interdisciplinary challenges. For instance, ef cient programming models and tools for MPSoC are largely an open issue: "Multi-core platforms are a reality - but where is the software support" (R. Lauwereins, IMEC). Solving it will require enormous research efforts as well as the education of a whole new breed of software engineers that bring the results from universities into industrial practice. Atthesametime, thedesignofcomplexMPSoCarchitecturesisanextremely time-consuming task, particularly in the wireless and multimedia application domains, where heterogeneous architectures are predominant. Due to the - ploding NRE and mask costs most companies are now following a platform approach: Invest a large (but one-time) design effort into a proper core - chitecture, and create easy-to-design derivatives for new standards or product features. Needless to say, only the most ef cient MPSoC platforms have a real chance to enjoy a multi-year lifetime on the highly competitive semiconductor market for embedded systems.

For the first time advances in semiconductor manufacturing do not lead to a corresponding increase in performance. At 65 nm and below it is predicted that only a small portion of performance increase will be attributed to shrinking geometries while the lion share is due to innovative processor architectures. To substantiate this assertion it is instructive to look at major drivers of the semiconductor industry: wireless communications and multimedia. Both areas are characterized by an exponentially increasing demand of computational power, which cannot be provided in an energy-efficient manner by traditional processor architectures. Todaya (TM)s applications in wireless communications and multimedia require highly specialized and optimized architectures.

New software tools and a sophisticated methodology above RTL are required to answer the challenges of designing an optimized application specific processor (ASIP). This book offers an automated and fully integrated implementation flow and compares it to common implementation practice. Case-studies emphasise that neither the architectural advantages nor the design space of ASIPs are sacrificed for an automated implementation. Realizing a building block which fulfils the requirements on programmability and computational power is now efficiently possible for the first time.

Optimized ASIP Synthesis from Architecture Description Language Models inspires hardware designers as well as application engineers to design powerful ASIPs that will make their SoC designs unique.

Today more than 90% of all programmable processors are employed in embedded systems. This number is actually not surprising, contemplating that in a typical home you might find one or two PCs equipped with high-performance standard processors, and probably dozens of embedded systems, including electronic entertainment, household, and telecom devices, each of them equipped with one or more embedded processors. The question arises why programmable processors are so popular in embedded system design. The answer lies in the fact that they help to narrow the gap between chip capacity and designer productivity. Embedded processors cores are nothing but one step further towards improved design reuse, just along the lines of standard cells in logic synthesis and macrocells in RTL synthesis in earlier times of IC design. Additionally, programmable processors permit to migrate functionality from hardware to software, resulting in an even improved reuse factor as well as greatly increased flexibility.

The LISA processor design platform (LPDP) presented in Architecture Exploration for Embedded Processors with LISA addresses recent design challenges and results in highly satisfactory solutions. The LPDP covers all major high-level phases of embedded processor design and is capable of automatically generating almost all required software development tools from processor models in the LISA language. It supports a profiling-based, stepwise refinement of processor models down to cycle-accurate and even RTL synthesis models. Moreover, it elegantly avoids model inconsistencies otherwise omnipresent in traditional design flows.

The next step in design reuse is already in sight: SoC platforms, i.e., partially pre-designed multi-processor templates that can be quickly tuned towards given applications thereby guaranteeing a high degree of hardware/software reuse in system-level design. Consequently, the LPDP approach goes even beyond processor architecture design. The LPDP solution explicitly addresses SoC integration issues by offering comfortable APIs for external simulation environments as well as clever solutions for the problem of both efficient and user-friendly heterogeneous multiprocessor debugging.

It is well known that embedded systems have to be implemented efficiently. This requires that processors optimized for certain application domains are used in embedded systems. Such an optimization requires a careful exploration of the design space, including a detailed study of cost/performance tradeoffs. In order to avoid time-consuming assembly language programming during design space exploration, compilers are needed. In order to analyze the effect of various software or hardware configurations on the performance, retargetable compilers are needed that can generate code for numerous different potential hardware configurations. This book provides a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of the fast developing area of retargetable compilers for embedded systems. It describes a large set important tools as well as applications of retargetable compilers at different levels in the design flow. Retargetable Compiler Technology for Embedded Systems is mostly self-contained and requires only fundamental knowledge in software and compiler design. It is intended to be a key reference for researchers and designers working on software, compilers, and processor optimization for embedded systems.

The building blocks of today's embedded systems-on-a-chip are complex IP components and programmable processor cores. This means that more and more system functionality is implemented in software rather than in custom hardware. In turn, this indicates a growing need for high-level language compilers, capable of generating efficient code for embedded processors. However, traditional compiler technology hardly keeps pace with new developments in embedded processor architectures. Many existing compilers for DSPs and multimedia processors therefore produce code of insufficient quality with respect to performance and/or code size, and a large part of software for embedded systems is still being developed in assembly languages. As both embedded software as well as processors architectures are getting more and more complex, assembly programming clearly violates the demands for a short time-to-market and high dependability in embedded system design. The goal of this book is to provide new methods and techniques to software and compiler developers, that help to make the necessary step from assembly programming to the use of compilers also in embedded system design. Code Optimization Techniques for Embedded Processors discusses the state-of-the-art in the area of compilers for embedded processors. It presents a collection of new code optimization techniques, dedicated to DSP and multimedia processors. These include: compiler support for DSP address generation units, efficient mapping of data flow graphs to irregular architectures, exploitation of SIMD and conditional instructions, as well as function inlining under code size constraints. Comprehensive experimental evaluations are given forreal-life processors, that indicate the code quality improvements which can be achieved as compared to earlier techniques. In addition, C compiler frontend issues are discussed from a practical viewpoint. Code Optimization Techniques for Embedded Processors is intended for researchers and engineers active in software development for embedded systems, and for compiler developers in academia and industry.

The market for consumer electronics is characterized by rapidly growing complexities of applications and decreasing market window opportunities. A key concept for coping with such requirements is the reuse of system components. Embedding programmable processors into VLSI systems facilitates reuse and offers a high degree of flexibility. The use of embedded processors, however, poses challenges for software compilers, because real-time constraints and limited silicon area for program memories demand extremely efficient machine code. Additionally there is a need for flexible, retargetable compilers which explore the mutual dependence between processor architectures and program execution speed. Current compiler technology does not meet these demands, particularly the area of DSP where application-specific processors are predominant. As a consequence, the largest part of DSP software is still developed manually at assembly language level. Recent research efforts, located at the intersection of software and hardware design, aim at eliminating this bottleneck. Retargetable Code Generation for Digital Signal Processors outlines the new role of compilers in hardware/software codesign of embedded systems, and it describes the state-of-the-art in the area of retargetable code generation and optimization for embedded DSPs. It presents novel concepts and algorithmic solutions, which achieve both retargetability and high code quality. In contrast to approaches taken in classical compiler construction, emphasis is put on effective code optimization instead of high compilation speed. The usefulness of the proposed techniques is demonstrated for real-life architectures. Retargetable Code Generation forDigital Signal Processors, with a foreword by Peter Marwedel, is the first contribution to this area, that presents an integrated solution for retargetable DSP compilers. It covers the whole compilation process, including target processor modelling, intermediate code generation, code selection, register allocation, scheduling and optimization for parallelism. It will be of interest to researchers, senior design engineers and CAD managers both in academia and industry.

A subtle change that leads to disastrous consequences-hardware Trojans undoubtedly pose one of the greatest security threats to the modern age. How to protect hardware against these malicious modifications? One potential solution hides within logic locking; a prominent hardware obfuscation technique. In this book, we take a step-by-step approach to understanding logic locking, from its fundamental mechanics, over the implementation in software, down to an in-depth analysis of security properties in the age of machine learning. This book can be used as a reference for beginners and experts alike who wish to dive into the world of logic locking, thereby having a holistic view of the entire infrastructure required to design, evaluate, and deploy modern locking policies.

Customizable processors have been described as the next natural step in the evolution of the microprocessor business: a step in the life of a new technology where top performance alone is no longer sufficient to guarantee market success. Other factors become fundamental, such as time to market, convenience, energy efficiency, and ease of customization.
This book is the first to explore comprehensively one of the most fundamental trends which emerged in the last decade: to treat processors not as rigid, fixed entities, which designers include "as is" in their products; but rather, to build sound methodologies to tailor-fit processors to the specific needs of such products. This book addresses the goal of maintaining a very large family of processors, with a wide range of features, at a cost comparable to that of maintaining a single processor.
- First book to present comprehensively the major ASIP design methodologies and tools without any particular bias.
- Written by most of the pioneers and top international experts of this young domain.
- Unique mix of management perspective, technical detail, research outlook, and practical implementation.