Improving the design flow for parallel and heterogeneous architectures running real-time applications: The PHARAON FP7 project

Abstract

In this article, we present the work-in-progress of the EU FP7 PHARAON project, started in September 2011. The first objective of the project is the development of new techniques and tools capable to guide and assist the designer in the development process, from UML specifications to implementation and debug on multicore platform. This tool chain will offer the possibility to propose and implement several parallelization strategies and drive the designer into implementation steps. The second objective of the project is to develop monitoring and control techniques in the middleware of the system capable to automatically adapt platform services to applications requirements and therefore reduce power consumption in a transparent manner for applications. embedded systems to integrate a growing range of complex functionalities. A smart phone, for example, is capable to communicate through 3G and WIFI connections while running other applications on Android or Windows Phone. It integrates phone services with high performance graphics and sophisticated software applications such as real-time video and audio. Designers are facing challenging problems as hardware architectures are evolving faster than multicore software development techniques. These techniques are not yet capable to provide efficient methodologies to exploit the full potential of multicore architectures satisfying all the requirements of embedded systems, including performance and power consumption. Accurately predicting the performance of an application implemented on such architectures has become very difficult, because of numerous factors such as cache coherency. Moreover, commonly taught programming models, that are generally based on sequential languages, are no longer sufficient, since early consideration of parallelism in applications has become critical. The lack of efficient software design techniques increases both software development costs and implementation risk in terms of costs and delays. Parallelism, heterogeneity, complex memory structures, efficient power monitors and controllers, are among the list of new functionalities provided by recent multicore systems that require to be adequately tackled by new design ⇑ Corresponding author.

Application specific instruction set processor for sensor conditioning in automotive applications

“…The trend in this design methodology branch is to develop multicore and parallel processing units (e.g. [16], [17], or in automotive application [18]). Design effort is a positive aspect of ASIP, too.…”