Sang-Young Cho

An embedded integration prototyping system based on component technique

Nowadays in the development of embedded system, cutting-edge embedded system products are quickly disappearing from the markets because of their short product development period which shortens the product life cycle. Therefore, strengthening its competitiveness and minimizing its development cost can be said to be one of the most important factors. For this motive, an Embedded Integration Prototyping (IP) system based on Component Technique was designed and implemented through this paper. The system is composed of Physical Prototyping (PP) providing the environment in which the product can be tested by using Actuator(Motor), Sensor and reusable Blocks, and Virtual Prototyping (VP) in which visual test on the product can be carried out by applying various components and libraries based on technique related to the computer. And, IP System was built in order to mutually compensate for drawbacks latent in both of physical and virtual prototyping environment by making use of component module. The module will be able to enhance the product competitiveness, through spending less time in developing kinds of the component owning almost same features, using it again for different embedded system products, and accordingly minimizing spent cost and time for developing the component.

The design a virtual prototyping based on ARMulator

Nowadays, the development of computer technology has several improvements, not only in popularity but also in complexity. Some engineers apply virtual prototyping to get the greatest advantage of prototype at the development life cycle. Basically, the virtual prototyping offers the external shape of product including their components, GUI and data into computer. The virtual prototyping can simulate various devices and their functions same as the real prototyping, but the virtual prototyping do not need the real board like the real prototyping. As a result, the virtual prototyping will bring more and more advantage instead of the real prototyping specially to develop the complex products which they have complex hardware devices. In this thesis, we want to show how to develop the new product with short time to market and time to prototype by using the virtual prototyping base on ARM core.

A Flexible Virtual Development Environment for Embedded Systems

On-time delivering of an embedded system solution to market is very crucial because the market is highly competitive and the demands of consumers rapidly change. Virtual development environment increases efficiency of the embedded system development because it enables developers to develop, execute, and verify an embedded system without real hardware. This paper deals with an implementation of a virtual development environment for ARM core-based embedded systems. The environment is developed based on ARMs ARMulator that is an instruction set simulation environment. The developed environment is extended to use SystemC hardware IPs by attaching a SystemC simulation engine to the modeled ASB bus. Therefore, the environment can use both ARMulator-based hardware models and SystemC-based hardware models. By adding hardware IP modules such as Memory controller, LCD controller, Interrupt controller, 1-ch DMA, UART, 2-ch Timer, Watchdog Timer, GPIO Ports and graphical user interface applications, the ARMulator environment is expanded to a virtual development environment for hand-held devices and general applications. In addition, a real-time operating system muC/OS-II is ported to the simulation environment so that the environment can be used to develop muC/OS-II-based application software. A three-task test program verifies the functionality of the hardware IP modules and muC/OS-II operations. Compared to other environments, its construction cost is very low and the environment can be easily modified according to a engineers needs.

Virtual Development Environment for Embedded Systems Using ARMulator and SystemC Models

Virtual development environment increases efficiency of embedded system development because it enables developers to develop, execute, and verify an embedded system without real target hardware. This chapter deals with an implementation of a virtual development environment for ARM core-based embedded systems. The environment is based on ARM’s ARMulator simulation environment and extended to use SystemC models by attaching a SystemC simulation engine to the ARMulator. Therefore, the environment can flexibly use both ARMulator-based and SystemC-based hardware models. We developed some hardware IP modules and user interface programs to enrich the environment for hand-held devices or general application development. In addition, a real-time operating system μC/OS-II is ported on the environment so that it can be used to develop multi-thread applications. Compared to other environments, its construction cost is very low and the environment can be easily modified according to an engineer’s needs.

A virtual simulation package for Embedded System training and education

Laboratory assignments for Embedded System courses are usually performed with a hardware-based training kit that equipped with an embedded system board, software development tools, and optionally an emulator for debugging. Using the hardware-based kits has some demerits such as high initial setup cost, burdensome maintenance, lacks of adaptability to industry evolution, and restricted educational outcomes. This paper deals with a simulation-based education package for laboratory works in Embedded System courses. The package uses the ARMs ARMulator environment that can simulate a simple ARM architecture board in cycle-level. We extended the ARMulator environment into a powerful one that can simulate an embedded system board by implementing various hardware IP models and peripheral simulation programs. The developed education package can be used to train students in Embedded System courses for topics such as assembly and C/C++ programming, processor architecture, memory system handling, peripheral control, system performance, real-time operating system, and development environment with overcoming the demerits of hardware-based kits.

A Host Program Implementation for Linux File System Tracing Method Using the Kprobes Linux Dynamic Instrumentation System

A storage performance analysis tool is crucial to finding performance bottlenecks in I/O storage systems and developing efficient storage system architectures or algorithms. This work is based on an integrated performance analysis tool for Linux file systems. The tool provides actual time information for Linux file system functions. In contrast to other existing tools, the tool provides a filtering mechanism, a graphical interface, and system-level analysis information without a heavy load of measurement. This paper describes a host program implementation for the performance analysis tool. It may be used by Linux developers or end-users for analyzing file system layers or measuring software performance to find bottlenecks in Linux file systems.

Virtual Development Environment Based on SystemC for Embedded Systems

Virtual development environment increases efficiency of embedded system development because it enables developers to develop, execute, and verify an embedded system without real hardware. We implemented a virtual development environment that is based on SystemC, a system modeling language. This environment was implemented by linking the AxD debugger with a SystemC-based hardware simulation environment through the RDI interface. We minimized modification of SystemC simulation engine so that the environment can be easily changed or extended with various SystemC models. Also, by using RDI, any debugging controller that support RDI can be used to develop an embedded software on the simulation environment. We executed example applications on the developed environment to verify operations of our implemented models and debugging functions. Our environment targets in ARM cores that are widely used in commercial business.

Parallel prediction of protein-protein interactions using proximal SVM

In general, the interactions between proteins are fundamental to a broad area of biological functions. In this paper, we try to predict protein-protein interactions in parallel on a 12-node PC-cluster using domains of a protein. For this, we use a hydrophobicity among proteins amino acids physicochemical feature and a support vector machine (SVM) among machine learning techniques. According to the experiments, we get approximately 60% average accuracy with 5 trials and we obtained an average speed-up of 5.11 with a 12-node cluster using a proximal SVM.