This book proposes novel memory hierarchies and software optimization techniques for the optimal utilization of memory hierarchies. It presents a wide range of optimizations, progressively increasing in the complexity of analysis and of memory hierarchies. The final chapter covers optimization techniques for applications consisting of multiple processes found in most modern embedded devices.
Energy-Aware Memory Management for Embedded Multimedia Systems: A Computer-Aided Design Approach presents recent computer-aided design (CAD) ideas that address memory management tasks, particularly the optimization of energy consumption in the memory subsystem. It explains how to efficiently implement CAD solutions, including theoretical methods an
Modern consumers carry many electronic devices, like a mobile phone, digital camera, GPS, PDA and an MP3 player. The functionality of each of these devices has gone through an important evolution over recent years, with a steep increase in both the number of features as in the quality of the services that they provide. However, providing the required compute power to support (an uncompromised combination of) all this functionality is highly non-trivial. Designing processors that meet the demanding requirements of future mobile devices requires the optimization of the embedded system in general and of the embedded processors in particular, as they should strike the correct balance between flexibility, energy efficiency and performance. In general, a designer will try to minimize the energy consumption (as far as needed) for a given performance, with a sufficient flexibility. However, achieving this goal is already complex when looking at the processor in isolation, but, in reality, the processor is a single component in a more complex system. In order to design such complex system successfully, critical decisions during the design of each individual component should take into account effect on the other parts, with a clear goal to move to a global Pareto optimum in the complete multi-dimensional exploration space. In the complex, global design of battery-operated embedded systems, the focus of Ultra-Low Energy Domain-Specific Instruction-Set Processors is on the energy-aware architecture exploration of domain-specific instruction-set processors and the co-optimization of the datapath architecture, foreground memory, and instruction memory organisation with a link to the required mapping techniques or compiler steps at the early stages of the design. By performing an extensive energy breakdown experiment for a complete embedded platform, both energy and performance bottlenecks have been identified, together with the important relations between the different components. Based on this knowledge, architecture extensions are proposed for all the bottlenecks.
For real-time systems, the worst-case execution time (WCET) is the key objective to be considered. Traditionally, code for real-time systems is generated without taking this objective into account and the WCET is computed only after code generation. Worst-Case Execution Time Aware Compilation Techniques for Real-Time Systems presents the first comprehensive approach integrating WCET considerations into the code generation process. Based on the proposed reconciliation between a compiler and a timing analyzer, a wide range of novel optimization techniques is provided. Among others, the techniques cover source code and assembly level optimizations, exploit machine learning techniques and address the design of modern systems that have to meet multiple objectives. Using these optimizations, the WCET of real-time applications can be reduced by about 30% to 45% on the average. This opens opportunities for decreasing clock speeds, costs and energy consumption of embedded processors. The proposed techniques can be used for all types real-time systems, including automotive and avionics IT systems.
The power consumption of microprocessors is one of the most important challenges of high-performance chips and portable devices. In chapters drawn from Piguet's recently published Low-Power Electronics Design, this volume addresses the design of low-power microprocessors in deep submicron technologies. It provides a focused reference for specialists involved in systems-on-chips, from low-power microprocessors to DSP cores, reconfigurable processors, memories, ad-hoc networks, and embedded software. Low-Power Processors and Systems on Chips is organized into three broad sections for convenient access. The first section examines the design of digital signal processors for embedded applications and techniques for reducing dynamic and static power at the electrical and system levels. The second part describes several aspects of low-power systems on chips, including hardware and embedded software aspects, efficient data storage, networks-on-chips, and applications such as routing strategies in wireless RF sensing and actuating devices. The final section discusses embedded software issues, including details on compilers, retargetable compilers, and coverification tools. Providing detailed examinations contributed by leading experts, Low-Power Processors and Systems on Chips supplies authoritative information on how to maintain high performance while lowering power consumption in modern processors and SoCs. It is a must-read for anyone designing modern computers or embedded systems.
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Integrated Circuit and System Design, PATMOS 2011, held in Madrid, Spain, in September 2011. The 34 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The paper feature emerging challenges in methodologies and tools for the design of upcoming generations of integrated circuits and systems and focus especially on timing, performance and power consumption as well as architectural aspects with particular emphasis on modeling, design, characterization, analysis and optimization.
From basic architecture, interconnection, and parallelization to power optimization, this book provides a comprehensive description of emerging multicore systems-on-chip (MCSoCs) hardware and software design. Highlighting both fundamentals and advanced software and hardware design, it can serve as a primary textbook for advanced courses in MCSoCs design and embedded systems. The first three chapters introduce MCSoCs architectures, present design challenges and conventional design methods, and describe in detail the main building blocks of MCSoCs. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 discuss fundamental and advanced on-chip interconnection network technologies for multi and many core SoCs, enabling readers to understand the microarchitectures for on-chip routers and network interfaces that are essential in the context of latency, area, and power constraints. With the rise of multicore and many-core systems, concurrency is becoming a major issue in the daily life of a programmer. Thus, compiler and software development tools are critical in helping programmers create high-performance software. Programmers should make sure that their parallelized program codes will not cause race condition, memory-access deadlocks, or other faults that may crash their entire systems. As such, Chapter 7 describes a novel parallelizing compiler design for high-performance computing. Chapter 8 provides a detailed investigation of power reduction techniques for MCSoCs at component and network levels. It discusses energy conservation in general hardware design, and also in embedded multicore system components, such as CPUs, disks, displays and memories. Lastly, Chapter 9 presents a real embedded MCSoCs system design targeted for health monitoring in the elderly.
To the hard-pressed systems designer this book will come as a godsend. It is a hands-on guide to the many ways in which processor-based systems are designed to allow low power devices. Covering a huge range of topics, and co-authored by some of the field’s top practitioners, the book provides a good starting point for engineers in the area, and to research students embarking upon work on embedded systems and architectures.
This volume introduces innovative power estimation and optimization methodologies to support the design of low power embedded systems based on high-performance VLIW microprocessors. A VLIW processor is a (generally) pipelined processor that can execute, in each clock cycle, a set of explicitly parallel operations.
Data Access and Storage Management for Embedded Programmable Processors gives an overview of the state-of-the-art in system-level data access and storage management for embedded programmable processors. The targeted application domain covers complex embedded real-time multi-media and communication applications. Many of these applications are data-dominated in the sense that their cost related aspects, namely power consumption and footprint are heavily influenced (if not dominated) by the data access and storage aspects. The material is mainly based on research at IMEC in this area in the period 1996-2001. In order to deal with the stringent timing requirements and the data dominated characteristics of this domain, we have adopted a target architecture style that is compatible with modern embedded processors, and we have developed a systematic step-wise methodology to make the exploration and optimization of such applications feasible in a source-to-source precompilation approach.
