A Traffic injection methodology with support for system-level synchronization

Shankar Mahadevan, Federico Angiolini, Jens Sparsø, Luca Benini, Jan Madsen

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingBook chapterResearchpeer-review

    Abstract

    In highly parallel Multi-Processor System-on-Chip (MPSoC) design stages, interconnect performance is a key optimization target. To effectively achieve this objective, true-to-life IP core traffic must be injected and analyzed. However, the parallel development of MPSoC components may cause IP core models to be still unavailable when tuning communication performance. Traditionally, synthetic traffic generators have been used to overcome such an issue. However, target applications increasingly present non-trivial execution flows and synchronization patterns, especially in presence of underlying operating systems and when exploiting interrupt facilities. This property makes it very difficult to generate realistic test traffic. This paper presents a selection of application flows, representative of a wide class of applications with complex interrupt-based synchronization; a reference methodology to split such applications in execution subflows and to adjust the overall execution stream based upon hardware events; a reactive simulation device capable of correctly replicating such software behaviours in the MPSoC design phase. Additionally, we validate the proposed concept by showing cycle-accurate reproduction of a previously traced application flow.
    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationVLSI-SoC: From Systems to Silicon : Best papers from IFIP TC 10, WG 10.5, Thirteenth International Conference ov Very Large Scale Integration of System on Chip
    EditorsRicardo Reis, Adam Osseiran
    Number of pages344
    PublisherSpringer
    Publication date2007
    Pages145-161
    ISBN (Print)978-0-387-73660-0
    Publication statusPublished - 2007
    SeriesIFIP International Federation for Information Processing
    Number240

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