The increasing processing power of today's HW/SW platforms leads to the integration of more and more functions in a single device. Additional design challenges arise when these functions share computing resources and belong to different criticality levels. The paper presents the CONTREX European project and its preliminary results. CONTREX complements current activities in the area of predictable computing platforms and segregation mechanisms with techniques to consider the extra-functional properties, i.e., timing constraints, power, and temperature. CONTREX enables energy efficient and cost aware design through analysis and optimization of these properties with regard to application demands at different criticality levels
The increasing processing power of today's HW/SW platforms leads to the integration of more and more functions in a single device. Additional design challenges arise when these functions share computing resources and belong to different criticality levels. CONTREX complements current activities in the area of predictable computing platforms and segregation mechanisms with techniques to consider the extra-functional properties, i.e., timing constraints, power, and temperature. CONTREX enables energy efficient and cost aware design through analysis and optimization of these properties with regard to application demands at different criticality levels. This article presents an overview of the CONTREX European project, its main innovative technology (extension of a model based design approach, functional and extra-functional analysis with executable models and run-time management) and the final results of three industrial use-cases from different domain (avionics, automotive and telecommunication)
In this paper, we present a flow for integrating hardware descriptions into Simulink simulations. It enables the automatic generation of a Simulink component out of a hardware component model given as RT level VHDL. The approach is based on two steps. The first step transforms the VHDL model to SystemC. In contrast to existing VHDL-to-SystemC transformation tools, the readability and configurability of the input model is preserved. In addition, our approach yields a more exact model, as a custom designed VHDL-like data-type system is employed. The second step generates a specific wrapper to allow the use of the component in a Simulink simulation. This transformation strategy will be evaluated with two industrial automotive electronics hardware designs.
Abstract. Evaluation and refinement of system models often require modifications in the model that follow concrete rules. In this work, a method for a flexible automation of such transformation steps will be presented. It allows savings in development time and reduces the error proneness. Therefore, a tool for rule based manipulation of VHDL design descriptions has been extended to enable its use with system models in C++ and SystemC. An automotive electronics application, the integration of SystemC modules into a MATLAB/Simulink simulation by automatic wrapper generation, will show its use in the design process.
In our work we aim at a composable and consistent specification and verification of contracts for extra-functional properties, such as power consumption or temperature. To this end, a necessary precondition for the semantical correctness of such properties is to ensure the structurally correct modeling of their interdependences. While this can be solved by a tailoring of the Component Based Design (CmpBD) frameworks, the resulting design constraints are specific to tools and viewpoints, not being sufficiently configurable for the designers. To solve this problem within the contract framework, Contract Based Design (CBD) with explicit port variables provides also no configurable but sound methodology for structurally relating the properties between different components and views. For that, we propose the idea of Structural Contracts. Using implicit structural ports, structural guarantees can be given according to the Component Based Design structure. Expressing structural design constraints by the means of structural assumptions, the CmpBD constraints can become part of the Contract Based Design framework and, thus, can be checked for compatibility and refinement. As a result, structural contracts enable the contract based specification and verification of structural rules for the correct modeling of functional and extra-functional interdependences. Providing both, property specifications and Component Based Design constraints by contracts, the approach is flexible and sound.
The ever rising energy and accordingly cooling demands are a major hurdle for the scalability of todays supercomputers. We are challenged with the need to increase computation performance to cope with the rising complexity of calculations on the one hand and the need to keep the energy/cooling demand stable or in the best case even to reduce it. Recently, one widely discussed way to do this is the integration of heterogeneous computation devices into the supercomputer systems as these tend to have a far better performance/energy ratio for large classes of applications. The obvious drawback of heterogeneous systems is the additional design complexity for the software development in order to efficiently use these devices in terms of performance as well as power. For this reason we propose a flow, which assists the software developer at design time, offering immediate power-and performance-estimation. Such approaches are already known in the embedded world, helping there to select between different design possibilities, and will be used to get the best possible performance from a massively heterogeneous computation platform, while still keeping the energy consumption in mind.
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