Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: As embedded systems are required to satisfy increasing functional and non-functional requirements, heterogeneous systems-on-chip architectures are progressively adopted. While these complex systems-on-chip deliver high performance, they require efficient coordination of the tasks they carry out. To tackle this challenge, designers often resort to runtime mechanisms allowing the dynamic alignment of application requirements with platform services. In turn, runtime mechanisms require the adoption of on-chip monitoring systems. The integration of on-chip monitoring systems into a system-on-chip results in a monitored system-on-chip. Notwithstanding, this integration risks driving a re-design and a re-implementation of the whole system-on-chip, potentially driving to a time-to-market deadline miss. In the literature, HW/SW co-design approaches for monitored systems-on-chip have been proposed to overcome the problem. However, the existing HW/SW co-design approaches prevent performing a system-level design-space exploration that involves all the monitoring requirements, and they also prevent adequate reuse of existing on-chip monitoring systems. This article proposes an approach for efficient HW/SW co-design of monitored systems-on-chip, aiming to comprehensively capture all monitoring requirements at the system-level and to perform a system-level design-space exploration to satisfy them, enforcing the reuse of existing on-chip monitoring systems. The proposed approach is validated through two experimental activities, which demonstrate a 24% reduction in total development time for a monitored system-on-chip implemented on FPGA, compared to the customary approach. The results also show that the approach reduces the risk of missing time-to-market deadlines, supports flexible design choices, and enables the reuse of on-chip monitoring systems.
DOI: 10.1145/3769075
Institutions: University of L'Aquila, University of Teramo
Language: English
Subfield: Hardware and Architecture
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4414371548