Hardware Acceleration for Conditional State-Based Communication Scheduling on Real-Time Ethernet

Distributed real-time applications implement distributed applications with timeliness requirements. Such systems require a deterministic communication medium with bounded communication delays. Ethernet is a widely used commodity network with many appliances and network components and represents a natural fit for real-time application; unfortunately, standard Ethernet provides no bounded communication delays. Conditional state-based communication schedules provide expressive means for specifying and executing with choice points, while staying verifiable. Such schedules implement an arbitration scheme and provide the developer with means to fit the arbitration scheme to the application demands instead of requiring the developer to tweak the application to fit a predefined scheme. An evaluation of this approach as software prototypes showed that jitter and execution overhead may diminish the gains. This work successfully addresses this problem with a synthesized soft processor. We present results around the development of the soft processor, the design choices, and the measurements on throughput and robustness

USING FAUST FOR FPGA PROGRAMMING

International audienceIn this paper we show the possibility of using FAUST (a programming language for function based block oriented programming) to create a fast audio processor in a single chip FPGA environment. The produced VHDL code is embedded in the on-chip processor system and utilizes the FPGA fabric for parallel processing. For the purpose of implementing and testing the code a complete System-On-Chip framework has been created. We use a Digilent board with a XILINX Virtex 2 Pro FPGA. The chip has a PowerPC 405 core and the framework uses the on chip peripheral bus to interface the core. The content of this paper presents a proof-of-concept implementation using a simple two pole IIR filter. The produced code is working, although more work has to be done for implementing complex arithmetic operations support

Hardware Acceleration for Conditional State-Based Communication Scheduling on Real-Time Ethernet

Abstract-Distributed real-time applications implement distributed applications with timeliness requirements. Such systems require a deterministic communication medium with bounded communication delays. Ethernet is a widely used commodity network with many appliances and network components and represents a natural fit for real-time application; unfortunately, standard Ethernet provides no bounded communication delays. Conditional state-based communication schedules provide expressive means for specifying and executing with choice points, while staying verifiable. Such schedules implement an arbitration scheme and provide the developer with means to fit the arbitration scheme to the application demands instead of requiring the developer to tweak the application to fit a predefined scheme. An evaluation of this approach as software prototypes showed that jitter and execution overhead may diminish the gains. This work successfully addresses this problem with a synthesized soft processor. We present results around the development of the soft processor, the design choices, and the measurements on throughput and robustness

Hardware Acceleration for Verifiable, Adaptive Real-Time Communication

Distributed real-time applications implement distributed applications with timeliness requirements. Such systems require a deterministic communication medium with bounded communication delays. Ethernet is a widely used commodity network with a large number of appliances and network components and represents a natural fit for real-time application; unfortunately, standard Ethernet provides no bounded communication delays. Network Code Processor is a soft processor implementation for real-time communication on Ethernet. The system provides a smart network-card functionality and can be seen as a co-processor for time-triggered communication. Its most distinguishing feature, the programmability of the processor via the Network Code language, allows developers to write adaptive but verifiable communication schedules tailored to the application needs. In this work we present results around the development of the soft processor, discuss the specific challenges of how to build a reliable and fast communication system, the tradeoffs involved when moving from a generic software prototype to a programmable hardware implementation

Plug-and-Play for Medical Devices: Experiences From a Case Study

Medical devices are pervasive throughout modern healthcare, but each device works on its own and in isolation. Interoperable medical devices would lead to clear benefits for the care provider and the patient, such as more accurate assessment of the patient’s health and safety interlocks that would enable error-resilient systems. The Center for Integration of Medicine & Innovative Technology (www.CIMIT.org) sponsors the Medical Device Plug-and-Play Interoperability program (www.MDPnP.org), which is leading the development and adoption of standards for medical device interoperability. Such interoperable medical devices will lead to increased patient safety and enable new treatment options, and the aim of this project is to show the benefits of interoperable and interconnected medical devices

Plug-and-Play for Medical Devices: Experiences From a Case Study

Medical devices are pervasive throughout modern healthcare, but each device works on its own and in isolation. Interoperable medical devices would lead to clear benefits for the care provider and the patient, such as more accurate assessment of the patient’s health and safety interlocks that would enable error-resilient systems. The Center for Integration of Medicine & Innovative Technology (www.CIMIT.org) sponsors the Medical Device Plug-and-Play Interoperability program (www.MDPnP.org), which is leading the development and adoption of standards for medical device interoperability. Such interoperable medical devices will lead to increased patient safety and enable new treatment options, and the aim of this project is to show the benefits of interoperable and interconnected medical devices