Hybrid Prototyping Methodology for Rapid System Validation in HW/SW Co-Design

Arief Wicaksana (1) , Amir Charif (1) , Caaliph Andriamisaina (1) , Nicolas Ventroux (1)

1 DACLE-LIST - Département d'Architectures, Conception et Logiciels Embarqués-LIST

As the System-on-Chip (SoC) complexity increases, hardware/software co-design plays an important role to improve design productivity, reduce time to market, and optimize the overall results. Consequently, there is a high interest in providing rapid system validation in such a paradigm to achieve the aforementioned objectives. There exist in previous works proto-typing techniques related to the development phase. FPGA-based prototyping has the benefits of enabling HW/SW integration and system validation after the Register Transfer Level (RTL) implementation is available while virtual platforms provide capabilities to accelerate software development with higher level functional models, e.g. Transaction Level Modeling (TLM). In this paper, we propose a hybrid prototyping methodology which takes advantage of virtual and FPGA-based prototyping in a single framework. We aim to provide a rapid and flexible system validation solution for HW/SW co-design at various stages of development based on the availability of TLM and RTL implementations. The proposed methodology allows online and offline performance analysis and debugging for early feedback in HW/SW architecture exploration. This was evaluated in the experiments with a neural network processor as a case study.

Keywords: hybrid prototyping; rapid system validation; HW/SW co-design

Domains: Embedded Systems

Arief Wicaksana, Amir Charif, Caaliph Andriamisaina, Nicolas Ventroux. Hybrid Prototyping Methodology for Rapid System Validation in HW/SW Co-Design. The Conference on Design and Architectures for Signal and Image Processing 2019 (DASIP 2019), Oct 2019, Montreal, Canada. ⟨cea-02494007⟩