Yonghui Li Wins Best Paper Award at ESTIMEDIA

We won the Best Paper Award at the 13th IEEE Symposium on Embedded Systems for Real-Time Multimedia (ESTIMedia) for our paper “Mode-Controlled Data-Flow Modeling of Real-Time Memory Controllers“. The paper was first-authored by Yonghui Li and was a successful collaboration with Orlando Moreira (previously with ST-Ericsson, currently with Intel) and two of his PhD students at Eindhoven University of Technology. We are happy that our work was well-received and hope the community will like the paper.

Paper about Data-Flow Modeling of Memory Controllers at ESTIMEDIA

Yonghui Li is having a good month. Last week he was notified that his journal article was accepted by the Real-Time Systems journal. This week, his paper “Mode-Controlled Data-Flow Modeling of Real-Time Memory Controllers” was accepted for presentation at the 13th IEEE Symposium on Embedded Systems for Real-Time Multimedia (ESTIMedia), a symposium that is a part of the Embedded Systems week in Amsterdam.

The paper is a collaboration with Orlando Moreira (previously with ST-Ericsson, currently with Intel) and his PhD students and continues Yonghui’s work on design and analysis of dynamically scheduled memory controllers. This work presents a mode-controlled data-flow model of the memory controller, which is used to derive bounds on the worst-case bandwidth for requests with variable sizes. An important difference with Yonghui’s earlier work is that this paper extends an existing model of computation to capture the memory controller and uses existing tools to do the analysis. This contrasts to his previous work where the analysis was done from scratch and required a lot of manual proofs. Examining this trade-off between modeling and analysis effort and quality of the results is a red thread through all of Yonghui’s work and is expected to be the main topic of his thesis.

Three Presentations at ESWEEK

The Embedded Systems Week kicks off next week in Montreal, Canada. Two of my students will be giving a total of three presentations, which may be interesting for those following my work. First, Sven Goossens will be presenting his CODES+ISSS paper “A Reconfigurable Real-Time SDRAM Controller for Mixed Time-Criticality Systems” on Monday September 30 10:30 – 11:00. On Thursday October 3, approximately, 09:50 – 10:10, he will also summarize all of his work on memory controllers for mixed time-criticality systems in an invited presentation entitled “A Mixed Time-Criticality SDRAM Controller” at the Memory Architecture and Organization Workshop (MeAOW). At almost the same time, October 3 10:00 – 10:30, Davit Mirzoyan will present his paper “Throughput Analysis and Voltage-Frequency Island Partitioning for Streaming Applications under Process Variation” at the Symposium on Embedded Systems for Real-Time Multimedia (ESTIMedia). We hope to see you there!

Accepted Paper at ESTIMedia 2013

To our great delight, Davit Mirzoyan’s paper “Throughput Analysis and Voltage-Frequency Island Partitioning for Streaming Applications under Process Variation” has been accepted at ESTIMedia 2013. The paper extends his earlier work and presents a framework to estimate the probability distribution of application throughput (e.g. frames per second in video decoding) in a system with Voltage-Frequency Island (VFI) partitions in the presence of process variation. The novelty of the framework lies in the computation of the probability distribution of throughput, based on a user-specified set of clock-frequency levels per VFI domain considering both within-die and die-to-die variations of cores. A methodology is furthermore provided to perform variation-aware partitioning of the cores of a MPSoC into VFIs for maximized timing yield (percentage of chips that satisfy a given throughput requirement).

Paper Accepted at ESTIMedia 2012

Andrew Nelson just had a paper “Power Versus Quality Trade-offs for Adaptive Real-Time Applications” accepted at ESTIMedia 2012. The paper is based on the work of Sjoerd te Pas, one of my graduated master students, and discusses how power consumption can be traded for application quality for adaptive real-time applications using existing DVFS techniques. The techniques are demonstrated for an H.263 application on an FPGA instance of the CompSOC platform. Stay tuned for the camera-ready version.

Update: The paper is now available online. Click here to read it.