A paper about the CompSOC tool-flow has been accepted that describes the highly automated effort of specifying and creating instances of the CompSOC platform, map applications to resources considering their real-time requirements, and executing the resulting system on FPGA. Three sub-flows of the tool-flow and their interactions are briefly explained: 1) the hardware tool flow, capable of translating a high-level description of a CompSOC platform instance into a fully synthesized implementation, 2) A system software flow, generating a software stack including a composable micro kernel, resource managers, drivers, and a virtual platform boot loader, and 3) An application flow that automatically generates a virtual platform configuration for applications that use the Cyclo-static Data Flow (CSDF) model of computation. The paper will be presented at FPGAworld and puts particular emphasis on practical aspects related to the first of these sub-flows and on the interaction with tools for our FPGA target.
Accepted Paper at CODES/ISSS 2013
Our paper “A Reconfigurable Real-Time SDRAM Controller for Mixed Time-Criticality Systems” has been accepted at CODES/ISSS 2013. The paper is first-authored by Sven Goossens and builds on the work of Jasper Kuijsten, a graduated master student from the Memory Team. In this paper, we present a new architecture of our real-time memory controller that supports predictable and composable run-time reconfiguration on use-case transitions, which allows trade-offs between guaranteed bandwidth, response time and power. It also presents a methodology for offering composable service to memory clients by means of composable memory patterns, an extension to our existing pattern-based approach. Lastly, a reconfigurable Time-Division Multiplexing (TDM) arbiter and an associated reconfiguration protocol are proposed. The TDM slot allocations can be changed at run time, while the predictable and composable performance guarantees offered to active memory clients are unaffected by the reconfiguration. The SDRAM controller has been implemented as a TLM-level SystemC model, and in synthesizable VHDL for use on an FPGA platform.