A platform development framework and a debugging mechanism based on computacional reflection / Um framework de desenvolvimento de plataformas e um mecanismo de depuração baseado em reflexão computacional

AUTOR(ES)
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

2007

RESUMO

Digital systems are becoming more and more complex through the years, putting general purpose processors together with specialized hardware and buses into the same silicon die, due to power, area and performance constraints. In order to deal with this complexity and a short time-to-market, designers are adopting high level hardware descriptions, based on languages such as SystemC. Those descriptions permit early software development and test under a simulated environment, and are also faster to be coded and simulated than low level descriptions. The tradeoff is the loss of simulation precision regarding clock cycles, that can be ignored in early project phases. ArchC is an architecture description language aiming retargetable instruction set simulator generation described in a SystemC like language. The generated simulator is full SystemC compatible and can be compiled with free available tools, as GNU GCC. Following industry path, it supports high level descriptions with Transaction Level Modeling (TLM) communication capabilities since version 2.0. A common problem when developing specialized hardware using high level description languages is debugging. The use of existing tools like GDB (GNU Debugger) is not straightforward since SystemC library becames part of the executable simulator. We propose a new platform debugging methodology based on computational reflection of SystemC modules to generate a dictionary. This dictionary feeds a special SystemC module capable of inspecting and changing attributes of platform modules at run time. In the present work, the ArchC Reference Platform is introduced. It aims the platform based architects, supplying a framework for platform design using ArchC simulators, introducing ArchC communication protocol, SystemC and platform design methodologies

ASSUNTO(S)

simulation (computers) simulação (computadores) hardware - arquitetura sistemas embutidos de computador hardware (architecture) computer systems sistemas e computação embedded computer systems

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