ESE 566: Hardware/Software Co-Design of Embedded Systems Fall 2005

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ESE 566 Hardware/Software Co-Design of Embedded
SystemsFall 2005 Instructor Dr. Alex Doboli.

• Paper discussed in class F. Vermeulen, F.
  Catthoor, L. Nachtergaele, D. Verkest, H. De Man,
  Power-Efficient Flexible Processor Architecture
  for Embedded Applications, IEEE Transactions on
  VLSI Systems, Vol. 12, No. 3, June 2003, pp.
  376-385.

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Brief description of the paper content

• Briefly, present the architectural concept
  presented in the paper.
• What is the main design issue addressed in the
  paper? Why is this important? What implications
  does it have on the architecture?

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Energy Consumption of Different Implementations

• Discuss the overheads introduced by different
  implementations.
• What kind of energy figures are the authors
  reporting?

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Flexible Hybrid Architecture

• How is flexibility achieved in the proposed
  architecture?
• How is power overhead reduced?
• Why is context switch problematic?
• How would you define partitioning for this
  architecture?

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Protocol for Flexible Architecture

• What are the switching points for the customized
  IPs?
• Discuss the protocol in Figure 5.
• Discuss the clocking cosntraints of the IPs and
  flexible component

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ESE 566 Hardware/Software Co-Design of Embedded
SystemsFall 2005 Instructor Dr. Alex Doboli.

• Paper discussed in class M. Mar, B. Sullam, E.
  Blom, An Architecture for a Configurable
  Mixed-Signal Device, IEEE Journal on Solid-State
  Circuits, Vol. 38, No. 3, March 2003, pp. 565-568.

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PSOC Architecture

• Summarize the PSOC architecture.
• What applications is PSOC designed for?
• What kind of flexibility does PSOC architecture
  offer? What kind of application dependent
  customization can you do using PSOC?

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PSOC Architecture

• Discuss the structure of reconfigurable analog
  blocks (Figure 2).
• What is switching noise?
• What kind of analog block programming can be
  performed?

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PSOC Architecture

• Discuss the programmable digital blocks (Figure
  3).
• Summarize the architectural features of PSOC.
• What research opportunities do you see for PSOC
  like architectures?