Thesis
Evaluating hardware/software partitioning and an embedded Linux port of the Virtex-II pro development system
Washington State University
Master of Science (MS), Washington State University
2006
Handle:
https://hdl.handle.net/2376/510
Abstract
The embedded system application space is growing at a fast pace and has a very wide range that encompasses minute sensor nodes through large FPGA based systems with multiple embedded processors within a single chip. Regardless of the application type and size; testing, monitoring and debugging of these systems remain central to their success as solutions to today's problems. The Virtex-II Pro development system offered by Xilinx is an embedded development environment that has benefited greatly from the system on chip design approach. It is a programmable system with two embedded IBM Power PCs and an FPGA all of which are connected via IBM's core-connect bus. This makes the system suitable for emulating applications in actual hardware while offering at speed testing. This thesis examines several embedded systems design considerations such as the hardware/software partitioning and the timeliness of event handling. The objective is to provide a stable development environment that exploits the hardware features of the board to allow for ease of use particularly in the educational sector. Digital adaptive filtering is considered to demonstrate the benefits and flexibility offered by this development system. Significant performance gains are recorded with a well-partitioned finite impulse response filter showing that the software-based filter is outperformed by 72%. Another aspect of this research is to port an embedded operating system to manage the hardware and offer design flexibility. The embedded Linux kernel has been considered as the suitable real-time operating system (RTOS) and the first challenge is to ensure that the embedded cores are simultaneously visible to the operating system and user under shared memory system environment. This approach has been chosen with the view that tasks executing on any of the processors will for the most part be required to work towards a common goal. The shared memory approach has not been a success due to the cache coherence issues, however, sample device drivers under the Linux kernel have been written and the kernel successfully ported to run on a single processor.
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Details
- Title
- Evaluating hardware/software partitioning and an embedded Linux port of the Virtex-II pro development system
- Creators
- Hsiang-Ling Jamie Lin
- Contributors
- Jabulani Nyathi (Degree Supervisor)
- Awarding Institution
- Washington State University
- Academic Unit
- Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, School of
- Theses and Dissertations
- Master of Science (MS), Washington State University
- Publisher
- Washington State University; [Pullman, Washington] :
- Identifiers
- 99900525065001842
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Thesis