The JPEG still picture compression standard
Communications of the ACM - Special issue on digital multimedia systems
Locality As a Visualization Tool
IEEE Transactions on Computers
Specification and Design of Embedded Hardware-Software Systems
IEEE Design & Test
IEEE Micro
The ChARM Tool for Tuning Embedded Systems
IEEE Micro
VLSI '93 Proceedings of the IFIP TC10/WG 10.5 International Conference on Very Large Scale Integration
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Teaching how to design and tune an embedded system is indeed a difficult task, since the student has to learn the many trade-offs that lead to the final system configuration. Existing tools are often too complex, or do not stress the basic steps in the design path. These steps are very useful during the first training sessions. The environment Csim 2, which is used at our university, permits the student to become familiar with concepts of program locality, cache structure and performance tuning, while analyzing actual data produced by the actual software that has to be tied with the embedded system. The student can analyze program behavior by means of locality graphs, or run extensive parametric simulations in order to find the best configuration that minimize either system cost, power consumption, or execution time. Further optimizations allow the designer to explore more sophisticated features like selective cacheing, cache locking, scratch memory, and code mapping for better cache exploitation. In this paper we show the basic capabilities of the environment, and some example of training sessions. By means of graphs about program locality and performance metrics, the student is readily conducted to learn how to select an adequate embedded system configuration.