Architectural Design Exploration for Real-Time Embedded Systems

实时嵌入式系统的架构设计探索

• 批准号: 9612298
• 负责人: Xiaobo Hu
• 金额: $ 15.12万
• 依托单位: Western Michigan University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 1996
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1996-09-01 至 1999-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=9612298&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Architectural; Design; Exploration; Real; Time

Advances in both hardware and software design have enabled system designers to develop large, complex embedded systems. Such systems may contain a mixture of software programs running on general purpose or special-purpose processors, high-speed memory systems, and application specific hardware devices. One of the key tasks in designing these systems is to find a "best" system architecture including determining the "right" partition between hardware and software components and selecting the "right" hardware components. The focus of this project is to develop a viable methodology as well as a set of tools to assist system designers in this architectural design exploration task. The research proposed performs design exploration at the system level. At this level, a system is specified as a collection of task graphs and an implementation is described by an interconnection of hardware components and an assignment of processes to the hardware components. Though the problem shares some similarities with the hardware synthesis problem, many different issues need to be addressed in order for this approach to be effective. One of the issues is identifying and estimating appropriate parameters to be included in the exploration process such that system timing performance can be adequately predicted. The project emphasizes design exploration for embedded systems with real-time constraints. Such systems can be found in many applications, such as navigation and landing control of aircraft, networks and communications. Attributes that are useful for guiding design exploration will be devised so as to efficiently analyze the timing behavior of a large number of implementations with respect to the system timing specifications and hence permit exploration of a wide range of design options. Other issues including sensitivity analysis and component reuse will also be addressed. To properly handle conflicting performance requirements including both functional and non-functional attributes, an approach based on imprecise value functions from utility theory will be pursued. Furthermore, the design exploration problem is formulated as a multi-attribute optimization problem. Techniques from the evolutionary computation field will be investigated in order to tackle the exponential nature of the optimization problem.

硬件和软件设计的进步使系统设计人员能够开发大型、复杂的嵌入式系统。此类系统可以包含在通用或专用处理器、高速存储器系统和专用硬件设备上运行的软件程序的混合。设计这些系统的关键任务之一是找到“最佳”系统架构，包括确定硬件和软件组件之间“正确”的划分以及选择“正确”的硬件组件。该项目的重点是开发一种可行的方法以及一套工具来协助系统设计人员完成架构设计探索任务。 所提出的研究在系统层面进行设计探索。在此级别，系统被指定为任务图的集合，并且通过硬件组件的互连以及进程到硬件组件的分配来描述实现。尽管该问题与硬件综合问题有一些相似之处，但为了使这种方法有效，需要解决许多不同的问题。 问题之一是识别和估计探索过程中要包含的适当参数，以便可以充分预测系统定时性能。该项目强调对具有实时约束的嵌入式系统的设计探索。 此类系统可以在许多应用中找到，例如飞机的导航和着陆控制、网络和通信。将设计有助于指导设计探索的属性，以便有效地分析大量实现相对于系统时序规范的时序行为，从而允许探索广泛的设计选项。其他问题包括敏感性分析和组件重用也将得到解决。为了正确处理相互冲突的性能要求，包括功能性和非功能性属性，将寻求一种基于效用理论中不精确价值函数的方法。此外，设计探索问题被表述为多属性优化问题。将研究进化计算领域的技术，以解决优化问题的指数性质。