Platform-based Design Approach Research Articles

Cyber-physical platform development and implementation for industry 4.0

AbstractIndustry 4.0 is referred as the fourth industrial revolution that represents the information intensive transformation of industrial automation and manufacturing processes. Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are building blocks in Industry 4.0 and part of the Industry 4.0 vision. This paper presents a cyber-physical platform development and implementation strategy for Industry 4.0 applications. It has been considered a cyber-physical platform model (CPP) built upon hardware reconfigurable technology based on a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) processor framework. The development strategy exploits the full benefits enabled by reconfigurable hardware, such as scalability of complex systems, platform-based design approach, adaptive processing, real-time constrains management, or high performance prototyping capabilities. The implemented experimental setup also combines major advantages of both the hardware and software platform-based design trends in Industry 4.0. In this endeavor, the used software toolkit comprises the entire system complexity as a high performance integration layer. The presented design method and implementation strategy can serve as rough orientation for future CPS research and development activities.

A development and verification framework for the SegBus platform

We describe the creation of a development framework for a platform-based design approach, in the context of the SegBus platform. The work intends to provide automated procedures for platform build-up and application mapping. The solution is based on a model-based process and heavily employs the UML. We develop a Domain Specific Language to support the platform modeling. An emulator is consequently introduced to allow an as much as possible accurate performance estimation of the solution, at high abstraction levels. Automated execution schedule generation is also featured. The resulting framework is applied to build actual design solutions for a MP3-decoder application.

Platform-Based Design Approach for Embedded Vision Applications

Implementation of an efficient, complex real-time image and video processing system has many different contrary design needs. These systems require managing and processing a large amount of data in a timely manner. The robust implementation requires design reuse and flexibility, which is very crucial for an ever-increasing application need. A combination of hardware and software which form a platform fulfills the demands of the continuously developing application domain. The platform-based design has recently gained in importance which allows to explore the trade-offs between various designs requirements for the hardware and software implementation of real-time image and video processing algorithms and its systems. In this paper, we present the exploration of platform-based design approach for implementing a real-time vision system. We have used the platform-based design approach to design a configurable real-time image and video streaming module for vision-based systems on an Virtex-5 FPGA. We have also implemented a real-time image and video acquisition module for a smart camera system. 

A Variability-Aware Robust Design Space Exploration Methodology for On-Chip Multiprocessors Subject to Application-Specific Constraints

Manufacturing process variation is dramatically becoming one of the most important challenges related to power and performance optimization for sub-90nm CMOS technologies. Process variability impacts the optimization of the target system metrics, that is, performance and energy consumption by introducing fluctuations and unpredictability. Besides, it impacts the parametric yield of the chip with respect to application level constraints by reducing the number of devices working within normal operating conditions. The impact of variability on systems with stringent application-specific requirements (such as portable multimedia and critical embedded systems) is much greater than on general-purpose systems given the emphasis on predictability and reduced operating margins. In this market segment, failing to address such a problem within the early design stages of the chip may lead to missing market deadlines and suffering greater economic losses. In the context of a design space exploration framework for supporting the platform-based design approach, we address the problem of robustness with respect to manufacturing process variations. First, we apply Response Surface Modeling (RSM) techniques to enable an efficient evaluation of the statistical measures of execution time and energy consumption for each system configuration. Then, we apply a robust design space exploration framework to afford the problem of the impact of manufacturing process variations onto the system-level metrics and consequently onto the application-level constraints. We finally provide a comparison of our design space exploration technique with conventional approaches on two different case studies.

A platform-based strategic design approach for universal products

In this paper, we extend concepts from product family and platform design and mass customisation to create a method for a universal product family design. The objective of this paper is to develop a universal design method to generate an economically feasible design concept and evaluate the design feasibility with respect to disabilities within a product family in uncertain market environments. We consider a platform-level problem as a module selection problem for determining design parameters in variant modules for unique or common modules by minimising the production cost and maximising accessibility in a universal product family. In particular, a Bayesian game is employed to model uncertain situations regarding market environments. The proposed method is used to decide strategic equilibrium solutions for selecting modules in the universal product family being designed. To demonstrate implementation of the proposed method, we use a case study involving a family of kitchen products.

An agile development methodology applied to embedded control software under stringent hardware constraints

In recent years, discrete control systems play an important role in the development and advancement of modern civilization and technology. Practically every aspect of our life is affected by some type of control systems. This kind of system maybe classified as an embedded real-time system and requires rigorous methodologies to develop the software that is under stringent hardware constraints. Therefore, the proposed development methodology adapts agile principles and patterns in order to build embedded control systems focusing on the issues related to the system's constraints and safety. Strong unit testing is the foundation of the proposed methodology for ensuring timeliness and correctness. Moreover, platform-based design approach is used to balance costs and time-to-market in view of performance and functionality constraints. We conclude that the proposed methodology reduces significantly the design time and cost as well as leads to better software modularity and reliability.

Hardware acceleration for similarity computations of feature vectors

In Web mining applications, an enormous amount of data needs to be processed quickly and efficiently. Thus, hardware support is crucial to enhance the performance of these operations. In this work, chip-level hardware support for similarity measure calculation is introduced and then extended to similarity matrix computation. Both software and hardware versions of various similarity computations are implemented with a hierarchical platform-based design approach to facilitate component reuse at different levels of abstraction. Software modules are executed on a reconfigurable soft processor core on the same field-programmable gate array (FPGA) as the hardware implementations for the purpose of performance comparison. Preliminary results using parallel hardware are also presented. In addition, performance gain from hardware as opposed to a general-purpose processor is examined. Experimental results show that the performance of similarity computation for a set of feature vectors could be significantly enhanced by using on-chip hardware.

TXM

Arterial oxygen saturation and heart rate measured by pulse oximetry is widely used to monitor critical care patients. This kind of system is classified as embedded hard real-time system and requires rigorous development methodologies to guarantee the correctness and timeliness of the application. Therefore, the proposed development methodology combines agile principles with organizational patterns and adapts them to build medical devices focusing on the issues related to the system's constraints and safety. Strong unit testing is the foundation of the proposed methodology for ensuring timeliness and correctness. Moreover, platform-based design approach is used to balance costs and time-to-market in view of performance and functionality constraints. We conclude that the proposed methodology reduces significantly the design time and cost as well as leads to better software modularity and safety.

Platform-based design for an embedded-fingerprint-authentication device

Fingerprint authentication, in an embedded and portable context, requires complex signal, network, and security-protocol processing in a resource-constrained implementation. We present a platform-based design approach for this application, based on a hierarchy of virtual machines (VM). The fingerprint authentication is programmed in Java, C, and VHSIC hardware description language, and mapped onto a hierarchy of three machines, consisting of an embedded Java VM, an Sparc-V8 core, and an field programmable gate array. We show how our approach is able to cope with multiple concurrent design processes and multiple application domains, including biometrics signal processing, as well as security-protocol implementation. The platform-based design approach also deals with reuse requirements for embedded software and hardware. The formulation of a platform as a VM enables design exploration and incremental design validation throughout the design traject, and results in a specialized, but still programmable, platform. The Java bytecode of our fingerprint authentication takes less than 10 kB.