introduction to the course embedded computing 9...

Mittuniversitetet

Introduction to the course Embedded Computing 9 hp

Benny Thörnberg

Associate Professor in Electronics

Mittuniversitetet

Organization

VHDL 3 hp SoC 4 hp Report 2 hp

Embedded Computing 9 hp

L V E L SR

E: One exercise

F: Five lectures given in classroom

L: Eight experiments in lab

R: One lab report and one full project report

S: One oral presentation at seminar and technical documentation

V: Online video lectures

R

Course Home page: http://apachepersonal.miun.se/~bentho/ec/index.htm

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Time planning

Fx Week Moment Teacher Comments

F1 4 Introduction B. Thörnberg

F2 4 VHDL B. Thörnberg

F3 5 SoC B. Thörnberg



Lectures (2 h)

Ex Week Moment Teacher Comments

E1 6 VHDL B. Thörnberg After L0

Excercises (2h)

E Week Moment Teacher Comments

S 12 SoC B. Thörnberg

Seminar ( 4h)

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Time planning

Lx Week Moment Teacher Comments

L0 5 VHDL, Experiment 0 B. Thörnberg After F2

L1 5 SoC, Experiment 1 B. Thörnberg




L5 8 SoC, Experiemnt 5 B. Thörnberg



Experiments (4h)

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Course literature and reading instructions

Douglas ComerEssentials of Computer Architecture

2nd Edition

CRC Press, www.crcpress.com

This book is available in digital format as E-book at university library.

Recommended Chapters in textbook to read:

Chapter Title

4, The Variety of Processors And Computational Engines 5, Processor Types And Instruction Sets6, Data Paths And Instruction Execution8, CPUs: Microcode, Protection, And Processor Modes10, Memory And Storage11, Physical Memory And Physical Addressing12, Caches and Caching14, Input/Output Concepts And Terminology15, Buses and Bus Architectures16, Programmed And Interrupt-Driven I/O18, Parallelism19, Data Pipelining20, Power And Energy Additional material in the form of handouts or Webb links might occur.

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Examination – Summary

0.0 hp, I101: Written assignment, Signature on form for lending experimental

equipmentGrades: Pass or Fail.

3.0 hp, L101: VHDL, Active participation in a laboratory assignment with written report,Grades: Pass or Fail.

4.0 hp, P101: SoC, Active participation in a project assignment with oral presentation and technical documentation.

Grades: A, B, C, D, E, Fx and F. A-E are passed and Fx and F are failed.

2.0 hp, R101: Report on projectGrades: A, B, C, D, E, Fx and F. A-E are passed and Fx and F are failed.

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Examination – Oral presentation at seminar

• All groups should prepare a 20 minutes presentation for all experiments on SoC, 15 min talk and 5 min for questions.

• Slides should be in PowerPoint format and first slide must have names of all students in group. Max 2 students in each group.

• Disposition should cover all elements of a full project report

• All group members must participate actively on the presentation

• Presentation should be sent to teacher on the day before the seminar.

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Examination – Reports

• A separate lab report should be written for the experiment in VHDL modelling,

• For the whole course including VHDL and SoC, a full project report should be written. In the analysis part of this report, in addition to other discussions, you should validate to what extent you have fulfilled the learning goals of this course.

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Examination – Written assignment

• A box with experimental equipment will be lent to each student group. Students are responsible for returning this equipment after the course has finished. Returned equipment must have no damages or show any failure.

• A form will be given to each group that must be signed by all students in group. Max two students per group. This form is a contract that states that you must hand in the equipment without having any damages after the course has ended.

• Signatures on this contract is the basis for “fail” or “pass” on I101.

• Failure to pass I101 before the third week of the course will cause the university to register an “early interruption” of the course which means that you can no longer continue.

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Essentials of

Embedded Systems Design

MittuniversitetetCopyright 2006 © Benny

Thörnberg 11:29

1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 201010

-3

10-2

10-1

100

101

102

103

104

Year

Tra

nsis

tors

Designer productivityTransistors per designer month (10K)

IC capacityTransistors per chip (M)

Ref: Embedded System Design, A Unified Hardware/Software Introduction,F. Vahid and T. Givargis, John Wiley & Sons Inc

Design productivity gap

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Definition of buzzwords

• Technology

• A manner of accomplishing a task using processes, methods, and skills

• E.g. System design on FPGA using RTL modelling and c-programming on embedded Arm processors

• Circuit Technology refers to the use of semiconductor material, design methods for VLSI circuits and manufacturing processes

• Method

• A systematic way of performing tasks

• E.g. High Level Synthesis (HLS) or RTL simulation

• Tool

• Software providing computer assistance to perform a method or to support a whole methodology

• Simulator to support RTL simulation or compiler to support c programming

• Design Methodology

• A systematic way of organizing system development work to improve designer’s productivity and project management. A Design Methodology is usually supported by a set of methods and tools.



• Design Metric

• A measurable feature of a system’s implementation

• E.g. power, latency, throughput

• Hardware Architecture

• A description of a set of physical or logical components and their interrelationships

• Computer Architecture

• A set of rules and methods that describes a programming model, organization and implementation of a computer system

• Software Hardware Co-design

• Concurrent design of hardware and software components of complex electronic systems

• IP-component (or equally IP-core, IP-block)

• A reusable unit of hardware logic and its corresponding software device driver that is the intellectual property of one party.



• Device driver

• A set of software functions hiding details of hardware and used by the operating system and by applications to access hardware

• System-On-Chip (SoC)

• Is a combination of software and electronic circuits on a single chip that integrates all components of a computer system including e.g. processors, memories and peripheral units, application software, operating system and device drivers.


Characteristics of embedded systems

• Embedded into various products

• A computer system being almost an invisible part of a product just adding intelligence and functionality to it

• Single-functioned

• Executes a single program, repeatedly

• Tightly-constrained

• Low cost, low power, small, fast, etc.

• Reactive and real-time

• Continously reacts to changes in the system’s environment

• Must compute certain results in real-time without delay


Design challenge – optimizing design metrics

• Obvious design goal:

• Construct an implementation with desired functionality

• Key design challenge:

• Simultaneous optimization of numerous design metrics

• Expertise with knowledge in both software and hardware is needed

• Not hardware and software engineers working in different worlds

• We should start the system design work with a model of required computation without making any immediate decisions on hardware/software partitioning

Power Size

Performance NRE cost


Design challenge – optimizing design metrics

• Common Design metrics

• Unit cost: the monetary cost of manufacturing each copy of the system, excluding NRE cost

• NRE cost (Non-Recurring Engineering cost): The one-time monetary cost of designing the system

• Size: the physical space required by the system

• Performance: the execution time or throughput of the system

• Power: the amount of power consumed by the system

• Flexibility: the ability to change the functionality of the system without incurring heavy NRE cost

• Time-to-prototype: the time needed to build a working version of the system

• Time-to-market: the time required to develop a system to the point that it can be released and sold to customers

• Maintainability: the ability to modify the system after its initial release

• Correctness, safety, many more

MittuniversitetetCopyright 2006 © Benny

Thörnberg 18:29

reconfigurable dedicated programmable

FPGA ASIC

standard cells phys. optimized

ASIP

GP-processor

DSP-processor

1E-04

1E-03

1E-02

1E-01

1E-00

1E+01

1E+02

1E-05

1E+00 1E+01 1E+02 1E+03 1E+04 1E+05 1E+06 MOPS/mm2

mW/MOPS

Ref: G. Kappen and T.G. Noll, “Application Specific Instruction Processor BasedImplementation of a GNSS Receiver on an FPGA”, Proceedings of Design, Automation andTest in Europe, DATE06, Munich, Germany, 2006.

Power versus Flexibility conflict


The performance design metrics

• Widely-used measure of systems and also widely-abused• Clock frequency or Instructions Per Second (IPS) are no good measures

• The user of a digital camera cares about how fast it processes images, not about IPS or frequency.

• Latency (response time)• Time between task start and end

• e.g. A camera can process an image in 0.25 sec

• Throughput• Tasks per second, e.g. A camera processes 16 images per second

• Throughput can be more than latency implies due to pipelined concurrency.


Time-to-market

• Time required to develop a product to the point it can be sold to customers

• Market window

• Period during which the product would have highest sales

• Delays can be costly

Sales

Time

Market window


NRE and unit cost metrics

• Technology A: NRE= 100 kSEK unit cost= 200 SEK

• Technology B: NRE= 500 kSEK, unit cost= 50 SEK

• Technology C: NRE= 1000 kSEK, unit cost= 10 SEK

• But, you must also consider time-to-market

Cost for different Technologies

0 1000 2000 3000 4000 50000

200

400

600

800

1000

1200

Number of manufactured units

Tota

l cost

kS

EK

Total production cost per volume

Technology A

Technology B

Technology C

0 10 20 30 40 500

200

400

600

800

1000

1200

Number of manufactured units

Unit c

ost

kS

EK

Total unit cost per volume

Technology A

Technology B

Technology C

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What to learn

For VHDL,

After completion of the course, student should know how to:

- Design, implement and verify FPGA based HW systems,

- Draw conclusions about the design, engineering and verification.

For SoC Design,

After completion of the course, student should know how to:

- Use tools for software-hardware co-design using reusable IP-components,

- Write c-code for an application supported by an operating system,

- Embed custom developed hardware and software drivers into a reusable IP-

component,

- Analyze the selected design methodology for a given project assignment,

- Analyze the selected circuit technology for a given embedded system,

- Analyze the hardware architecture for a given embedded system.

introduction to the course embedded computing 9...

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