Performance monitoring and assessment of embedded HW/SW systems

Performance assessment of embedded HW/SW systems built with various types of VLSI components, i.e. heterogeneous multi-processor architectures, is important to help the development of complex real-time applications. To design such a tool, two issues must be solved: the gathering of relevant information simultaneously on several components without disturbing the application behavior, display of the performance results in a way that can be easily interpreted by designers. This paper presents a significant solution for the two above issues. We first describe what the goal for designers is and what kind of applications are concerned. Then we describe the principle of collecting an event trace and the technique to evaluate the selected performance indexes. The monitoring technique, based on a specific ASIC, is non-intrusive and allows our tool to capture real-time event occurrences from software tasks, and even from hardware functions implemented in ASICs. Each event is automatically time-stamped, collected and processed in real-time to evaluate the performance indexes selected by the designer. We also describe the display tool which clearly shows the results to the designer according to different representations. This technique and the associate real-time performance analyzer are integrated in a complete development process based on the MCSE methodology.