Development of behavior-profilers for multimedia consumer electronics

Abstract

In spite of the rapid improvement of hardware performance, debugging and optimization still remain as important procedures for developing consumer electronics embedded systems due to the manufacturing cost and the product quality. However, because the properties of consumer electronics systems are significantly different from the traditional computing systems, the required functionalities of behavior-profilers for the multimedia consumer electronics systems have to be newly defined. We analyze the desirable characteristics of the behavior profilers for multimedia consumer electronics systems and based on the analysis results we also implement a novel profiler tool set which consists of light-weight profiler components and remotely executed GUI client programs. The implemented profiler tool set is independent to the processor architecture and able to analyze the whole system layers from operating systems to functions inside user-level applications. The effectiveness of our tool set was verified by actually performing optimization of a commodity digital TV system.