As the premier conference for the design and automation of electronic systems, DAC offers outstanding training, education, exhibits and superb networking opportunities for designers, researchers, tool developers and vendors.
MONDAY June 19, 10:30am - 12:00pm | 19AB
TRACK: EMBEDDED SYSTEMS
TOPIC AREA: EMBEDDED SYSTEM SOFTWARE
EVENT TYPE: MONDAY TUTORIAL
Tutorial 3: Multicore Software Development on ARM
Speakers:
Chris Shore - ARM Ltd., Cambridge, United Kingdom
David Black - Doulos Ltd., Austin, TX
David Black - Doulos Ltd., Austin, TX
An increasing number of embedded systems are built on a multicore architecture, whether this be a homegeneous collection of identical processors or a heterogeneous set of specialised processors. In either case, a multiplicity of symmetric and asymmetric programming paradigms are possible. Whatever the chosen software architecture, ultimately the design is built on top of hardware features provided by the processor and the surrounding bus and memory fabric which support software deployment and execution across multiple processors.
A solid understanding of these features and how they are employed by bare metal applications and operating systems is essential when designing a performant software architecture.
The first part of this session will examine multicore software architectures and then provide a comprehensive tutorial on the architectural and implementation features of hardware platforms which make them possible. Among other features, this will include hardware and software cache coherency, memory coherency, locks and semaphores, interprocess and interprocessor communication, interrupt management and distribution, multicore booting, memory management, context switching and power management. Examples, where applicable, will be drawn from the ARM architecture.
In the second part, David Black will look at the higher-level aspects of designing and architecting a software system to exploit a multiprocessing architecture. He will outline a variety of multi-processing design decomposition architectures, how to model the data flow between different processing elements, how to statically and dynamically configure process scheduling to avoid lockup, and how to interact with power management subsystems to dynamically control system power consumption and operating frequency.
Intended Audience: Embedded system software engineers
Pre-requisites: Experience of embedded software development
About the Speakers:
Chris Shore, Director, Technical Marketing at ARM Ltd
Chris has worked at ARM for over 16 years, currently as Director, Technical Marketing. For the previous 15 years, he was responsible for ARM’s customer training activity – delivering over 200 training courses every year to ARM’s customers and end users all over the world. He also managed ARM’s Active Assist onsite services and the ARM Approved partner program.
Chris is a regular speaker at conferences and industry events and has addressed audiences on ARM technology on every continent except Antarctica - opportunities there are limited but it is surely only a matter of time!
Chris has lived and worked in Cambridge for over 30 years. He holds an MA in Computer Science from Cambridge University, is a Chartered Engineer and a member of the Institute of Engineering and Technology (MIET).
David Black, Senior Member of Technical Staff, Doulos Ltd
David works for Doulos as an expert trainer in multiple technical languages as well as ARM processors. He holds ARM AAE and AAME certifications. His bleeding edge experiences in industry led to the co-authoring books and papers like "SystemC from the Ground Up", which provides helpful SystemC knowledge to the novice, even to today.
David spends considerable time investigating and creating useful white papers for the Doulos and hitech community, most recently, "Migrating to UVM 1.2" and "Transforming Slow Software into Fast Hardware using Vivado HLS", including webinars and source code for both. Today's presentation is a good example of the practicality and applicability of David's investigations.
David's home is Austin, Texas, the heartthrob of the state, though on any day he could be in any state or country providing Doulos training ranging from SystemC/TLM-2.0 and SystemVerilog/UVM to serveral ARM processor training sessions, and including Doulos training for the novice such as Embedded C programming.
