PERFORMANCE MONITORING AND ASSESSMENT OF EMBEDDED HW SW SYSTEMS/

Performance assessment of embedded HW/SW systems built with various ty pes of VLSI components, i.e. heterogeneous multi-processor architectur es, is important to help the development of complex real-time applicat ions. To design such a tool, two issues must be solved: the gathering of relevant information simultaneously on several components without d isturbing the application behavior, display of the performance results in a way that can be easily interpreted by designers. This paper pres ents a significant solution for the two above issues. We first describ e what the goal for designers is and what kind of applications are con cerned. Then we describe the principle of collecting an event trace an d the technique to evaluate the selected performance indexes. The moni toring technique, based on a specific ASIC, is non-intrusive and allow s 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 ev aluate the performance indexes selected by the designer. We also descr ibe the display tool which clearly shows the results to the designer a ccording to different representations. This technique and the associat e real-time performance analyzer are integrated in a complete developm ent process based on the MCSE methodology.