Abstract-Modern systems-on-a-chip are equipped with power architectures, allowing to control the consumption of individual components or subsystems. These mechanisms are controlled by a power-management policy often implemented in the embedded software, with hardware support. Today's circuits have an important static power consumption, whose low-power design require techniques like DVFS or power-gating. A correct and efficient management of these mechanisms is therefore becoming nontrivial. Validating the effect of the power management policy needs to be done very early in the design cycle, as part of the architecture exploration activity. High-level models of the hardware must be annotated with consumption information. Temperature must also be taken into account since leakage current increases exponentially with it.Existing annotation techniques applied to loosely-timed or temporally-decoupled models would create bad simulation artifacts on the temperature profile (e.g. unrealistic peaks). This paper addresses the instrumentation of a timed transactionlevel model of the hardware with information on the power consumption of the individual components. It can cope not only with power-state models, but also with Joule-per-bit traffic models, and avoids simulation artifacts when used in a functional/power/temperature co-simulation.
Every notion of a component for the development of embedded systems has to take heterogeneity into account: components may be hardware or software or OS, synchronous or asynchronous, deterministic or not, detailed w.r.t. time or not, detailed w.r.t. data or not, etc. A lot of approaches, following Ptolemy, propose to define several "Models of Computation and Communication" (MoCCs) to deal with heterogeneity, and a framework in which they can be combined hierarchically.This paper presents the very first design of a component model for embedded systems called 42. We aim at expressing fine-grain timing aspects and several types of concurrency as MoCCs, but we require that all the MoCCs be "programmed" in terms of more basic primitives. 42 is meant to be an abstract description level, intended to be translated into an existing language (e.g., Lustre) for execution and property validation purposes.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.