Institutional Repository
Technical University of Crete
Technical University of Crete
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EL
| URI: | http://purl.tuc.gr/dl/dias/2E5E111C-FAC7-409A-B01F-21F09072BA49 | ||
| Year | 2008 | ||
| Type of Item | Conference Full Paper | ||
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| Bibliographic Citation | I. Papaefstathiou, D. Mprachos, C. Yannakou, D. Pnevmatikatos. (2007). Rapid System Prototyping of Networking Embedded Systems using System-C. Presented at Parallel and Distributed Computing and Systems. [Online]. Available: file:///C:/Users/%CE%94%CE%B7%CE%BC%CE%AE%CF%84%CF%81%CE%B7%CF%82/Downloads/paper229.pdf | ||
| Appears in Collections |
Current networking embedded systems are heavilyheterogeneous environments involving hardware andsoftware modules with complex communication amongthem. In order to prototype such systems in the most rapidmanner, we need efficient methods for co-developing and,more importantly, co-simulating and co-verifying thehardware and the software modules. A very promisingapproach for such a development environment is the useof pure C++ for describing the system. In particular thesoftware engineers can use C/C++ while the hardwaredesign can be done in SystemC, a C++ class librarycapable of accurately modeling the hardwarefunctionality. In this paper, we first present the efficiencyof SystemC when designing Digital Signal Processors andnetworking CPU cores customized for media processing.We compare the design times and implementationcharacteristics of a 5-stage pipeline CPU core and acomplicated DSP module when they are implemented inSystemC as opposed to a traditional hardware descriptionlanguage. Our results demonstrate that a networking andDSP processing unit can be implemented in about 40%less time in SystemC than in VHDL, while the silicon costis used is no more than 20% higher; the performance ofthe hardware module is the same in both cases. Moreover,the SystemC hardware modules, communicate much fasterwith the software testbenches, which are commonlywritten in C, C++, therefore heavily accelerating thesimulation time. As a result, we believe that SystemC is avery promising approach for designing prototypes ofembedded systems in the most rapid way. In order tofurther accelerate the design process of embeddedsystems in general, We will release the demonstratedCPU and DSP cores as open-source, allowing anyone touse them.
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