| 1. |
- Ma, Ning
(författare)
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Ultra-low-power Design and Implementation of Application-specific Instruction-set Processors for Ubiquitous Sensing and Computing
- 2015
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The feature size of transistors keeps shrinking with the development of technology, which enables ubiquitous sensing and computing. However, with the break down of Dennard scaling caused by the difficulties for further lowering supply voltage, the power density increases significantly. The consequence is that, for a given power budget, the energy efficiency must be improved for hardware resources to maximize the performance. Application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) obtain high energy efficiency at the cost of low flexibility for various applications, while general-purpose processors (GPPs) gain generality at the expense of efficiency.To provide both high energy efficiency and flexibility, this dissertation explores the ultra-low-power design of application-specific instruction-set processors (ASIP) for ubiquitous sensing and computing. Two application scenarios, i.e. high-throughput compute-intensive processing for multimedia and low-throughput low-cost processing for Internet of Things (IoT) are implemented in the proposed ASIPs.Multimedia stream processing for human-computer interaction is always featured with high data throughput. To design processors for networked multimedia streams, customizing application-specific accelerators controlled by the embedded processor is exploited. By abstracting the common features from multiple coding algorithms, video decoding accelerators are implemented for networked multi-standard multimedia stream processing. Fabricated in 0.13 $\mu$m CMOS technology, the processor running at 216 MHz is capable of decoding real-time high-definition video streams with power consumption of 414 mW.When even higher throughput is required, such as in multi-view video coding applications, multiple customized processors will be connected with an on-chip network. Design problems are further studied for selecting the capability of single processors, the number of processors, the capacity of communication network, as well as the task assignment schemes.In the IoT scenario, low processing throughput but high energy efficiency and adaptability are demanded for a wide spectrum of devices. In this case, a tile processor including a multi-mode router and dual cores is proposed and implemented. The multi-mode router supports both circuit and wormhole switching to facilitate inter-silicon extension for providing on-demand performance. The control-centric dual-core architecture uses control words to directly manipulate all hardware resources. Such a mechanism avoids introducing complex control logics, and the hardware utilization is increased. Programmable control words enable reconfigurability of the processor for supporting general-purpose ISAs, application-specific instructions and dedicated implementations. The idea of reducing global data transfer also increases the energy efficiency. Finally, a single tile processor together with network of bare dies and network of packaged chips has been demonstrated as the result. The processor implemented in 65 nm low leakage CMOS technology and achieves the energy efficiency of 101.4 GOPS/W for each core.
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| 2. |
- Yu, Yang, 1991-
(författare)
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Design and Security Analysis of TRNGs and PUFs
- 2022
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- True Random Number Generators (TRNGs) and Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) are two important types of cryptographic primitives. TRNGs create a hardware-based, non-deterministic noise that is often used for generating keys, initialization vectors, and nonces for various applications that require cryptographic protection. PUFs have been proposed as a tamper-resistant alternative to the traditional secret key generation and challenge-response authentication methods. A compromised TRNG or PUF can lead to a system-wide loss of security.The conventional TRNG or PUF designs are challenged by new attack vectors such as deep learning-based side-channel analysis. In this dissertation, we propose several new PUF and TRNG designs and evaluations of their performance and security.The first PUF we introduce is called threshold PUF. We show that, in principle, any n-input threshold logic gate can be used as a base for building an n-input PUF. We implement and evaluate a threshold PUF based on recently proposed threshold logic flip-flops using SPICE simulation as a proof of concept. Threshold PUFs open up the possibility of using the rich body of knowledge on threshold logic implementations for designing PUFs. The second proposed design is a lightweight PUF construction called CRC-PUF, which focuses on protecting PUFs against machine learning-based modeling attacks. In CRC-PUF, input challenges are de-synchronized from output responses to make the PUF model difficult to learn. The input transformation which does the de-synchronization is based on a Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC), thus the name CRC-PUF. By changing the CRC generator polynomial for each new response, we assure that recovering the transforming challenge has a success probability of at most 2-86 for 128-bit challenge-response pairs.The first TRNG design we introduce is based on a Non-Linear Feedback Ring Oscillator (NLFRO). The proposed NLFRO-TRNG structure harvests randomness from noise and unpredictable variations in delay cells and bi-stable elements, which is further amplified by the formation of non-linear feedback loops. The NLFRO outputs have chaotic behavior, allowing the construction of TRNGs with high entropy and speed. We implement three NLFRO-TRNGs on FPGA and evaluate the properties of the implementations with the NIST 800-90B entropy estimation and NIST 800-22 statistical test suits. The second proposed TRNG design is based on a strong PUF. The PUF based TRNG exploits the inherent determinism of PUF to enable in-field testing of the entropy sources by known answer tests. We present a prototype FPGA implementation of the proposed TRNG based on an arbiter PUF that passes all NIST 800-22 statistical tests and has the minimal entropy of 0.918 estimated according to NIST 800-90B recommendations.Apart from TRNG and PUF designs, it is crucial to consider potential attack vectors that can be created leveraging recently emerged technologies. To that end, in the second part of this dissertation, we introduce a novel attack on FPGA-based PUF and TRNG implementations that combines bitstream modification along with deep learning-based side-channel analysis. We evaluate this new attack vector on the design of an arbiter PUF and a ring oscillator-based TRNG implemented on Xilinx Artix-7 28nm FPGAs. In both cases, we are able to achieve close to 100% classification accuracy to recover the output or response. In the case of the arbiter PUF, the attack can even overcome countermeasures that are based on encrypting the challenges or responses.With such potent attack vectors readily available, the construction of strong countermeasures is necessary. Unfortunately, many of the state-of-the-art countermeasures are one-sided. In the final part of the dissertation, we use a countermeasure proposed for the protection of the Advanced Encryption Standard as an example. We conduct experiments and conclude that it can assist another type of side-channel attack that is not considered by the countermeasure.
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| 3. |
- Chen, Xiaowen, 1982-
(författare)
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Efficient Memory Access and Synchronization in NoC-based Many-core Processors
- 2019
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In NoC-based many-core processors, memory subsystem and synchronization mechanism are always the two important design aspects, since mining parallelism and pursuing higher performance require not only optimized memory management but also efficient synchronization mechanism. Therefore, we are motivated to research on efficient memory access and synchronization in three topics, namely, efficient on-chip memory organization, fair shared memory access, and efficient many-core synchronization.One major way of optimizing the memory performance is constructing a suitable and efficient memory organization. A distributed memory organization is more suitable to NoC-based many-core processors, since it features good scalability. We envision that it is essential to support Distributed Shared Memory (DSM) because of the huge amount of legacy code and easy programming. Therefore, we first adopt the microcoded approach to address DSM issues, aiming for hardware performance but maintaining the flexibility of programs. Second, we further optimize the DSM performance by reducing the virtual-to-physical address translation overhead. In addition to the general-purpose memory organization such as DSM, there exists special-purpose memory organization to optimize the performance of application-specific memory access. We choose Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) as the target application, and propose a multi-bank data memory specialized for FFT computation.In 3D NoC-based many-core processors, because processor cores and memories reside in different locations (center, corner, edge, etc.) of different layers, memory accesses behave differently due to their different communication distances. As the network size increases, the communication distance difference of memory accesses becomes larger, resulting in unfair memory access performance among different processor cores. This unfair memory access phenomenon may lead to high latencies of some memory accesses, thus negatively affecting the overall system performance. Therefore, we are motivated to study on-chip memory and DRAM access fairness in 3D NoC-based many-core processors through narrowing the round-trip latency difference of memory accesses as well as reducing the maximum memory access latency.Barrier synchronization is used to synchronize the execution of parallel processor cores. Conventional barrier synchronization approaches such as master-slave, all-to-all, tree-based, and butterfly are algorithm oriented. As many processor cores are networked on a single chip, contended synchronization requests may cause large performance penalty. Motivated by this, different from the algorithm-based approaches, we choose another direction (i.e., exploiting efficient communication) to address the barrier synchronization problem. We propose cooperative communication as a means and combine it with the master-slave algorithm and the all-to-all algorithm to achieve efficient many-core barrier synchronization. Besides, a multi-FPGA implementation case study of fast many-core barrier synchronization is conducted.
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| 4. |
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| 5. |
- Liu, Ming, 1982-
(författare)
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A High-end Reconfigurable Computation Platform for Particle Physics Experiments
- 2008
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Modern nuclear and particle physics experiments run at a very high reaction rate and are able to deliver a data rate of up to hundred GBytes/s. This data rate is far beyond the storage and on-line analysis capability. Fortunately physicists have only interest in a very small proportion among the huge amounts of data. Therefore in order to select the interesting data and reject the background by sophisticated pattern recognition processing, it is essential to realize an efficient data acquisition and trigger system which results in a reduced data rate by several orders of magnitude. Motivated by the requirements from multiple experiment applications, we are developing a high-end reconfigurable computation platform for data acquisition and triggering. The system consists of a scalable number of compute nodes, which are fully interconnected by high-speed communication channels. Each compute node features 5 Xilinx Virtex-4 FX60 FPGAs and up to 10 GBytesDDR2 memory. A hardware/software co-design approach is proposed to develop custom applications on the platform, partitioning performance-critical calculation to the FPGA hardware fabric while leaving flexible and slow controls to the embedded CPU plus the operating system. The system is expected to be high-performance and general-purpose for various applications especially in the physics experiment domain. As a case study, the particle track reconstruction algorithm for HADES has been developed and implemented on the computation platform in the format of processing engines. The Tracking Processing Unit (TPU) recognizes peak bins on the projection plane and reconstructs particle tracks in realtime. Implementation results demonstrate its acceptable resource utilization and the feasibility to implement the module together with the sys-tem design on the FPGA. Experimental results show that the online track reconstruction computation achieves 10.8 - 24.3 times performance acceleration per TPU module when compared to the software solution on a Xeon2.4 GHz commodity server.
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| 6. |
- Liu, Ming, 1982-
(författare)
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Adaptive Computing based on FPGA Run-time Reconfigurability
- 2011
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In the past two decades, FPGA has been witnessed from its restricted use as glue logic towards real System-on-Chip (SoC) platforms. Profiting from the great development on semiconductor and IC technologies, the programmability of FPGAs enables themselves wide adoption in all kinds of aspects of embedded designs. Modern FPGAs provide the additional capability of being dynamically and partially reconfigured during the system run-time. The run-time reconfigurability enhances FPGA designs from the sole spatial to both spatial and temporal parallelism, providing more design flexibility for advanced system features. Adaptive computing delegates an advanced computing paradigm in which computation tasks and resources are intelligently managed in correspondence with conditional requirements. In this thesis, we investigate adaptive designs on FPGA platforms: We present a comprehensive and practical design framework for adaptive computing based on the FPGA run-time reconfigurability. It concerns several design key issues in different hardware/software layers, specifically hardware architecture, run-time reconfiguration technical support, OS and device drivers, hardware process scheduler, context switching as well as Inter-Process Communications (IPC). Targeting a special application of data acquisition (DAQ) and trigger systems in nuclear and particle physics experiments, we set up the data streaming model and conduct theoretical analysis on the adaptive system. Three application studies are employed to verify the proposed adaptive design framework: The first application demonstrates a peripheral controller adaptable system aiming at general embedded designs. Through dynamically loading/unloading a NOR flash memory controller and an SRAM controller, both flash memory and SRAM accesses may be accomplished with less resource consumption than in traditional static designs. In the second case, two real algorithm processing engines are adaptively time-multiplexed in the same reconfigurable slot for particle recognition computation. Experimental results reveal the reduced on-chip resource requirements, as well as an approximate processing capability of the peer static design. Taking advantage of the FPGA dynamic reconfigurability, we present in the third application a novel on-FPGA interconnection microarchitecture named RouterLess NoC (RL-NoC). RL-NoC employs the novel design concept of Move Logic Not Data (MLND), and significantly distinguishes itself from the existing interconnection architectures such as buses, crossbars or NoCs. It does not rely on routers to deliver packets hop by hop as canonical NoCs do, but buffers data packets in virtual channels and brings various nodes using run-time reconfiguration to produce or consume them. In comparison with canonical packet-switching NoCs, the routerless architecture features lower design complexity, less resource consumption, higher work frequency, more efficient power dissipation as well as comparable or even higher packet delivery efficiency. It is regarded as a promising interconnection approach in some design scenarios on FPGAs, especially for light-weight applications.
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| 7. |
- Shaoteng, Liu, 1984-
(författare)
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New circuit switching techniques in on-chip networks
- 2015
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Network on Chip (NoC) is proposed as a promising technology to address the communication challenges in deep sub-micron era. NoC brings network-based communication into the on-chip environment and tackles the problems like long wire complexities, bandwidth scaling and so on. After more than a decade's evolution and development, there are many NoC architectures and solutions available. Nevertheless, NoCs can be classi_ed into two categories: packet switched NoC and circuit switched NoC. In this thesis, targeting circuit switched NoC, we present our innovations and considerations on circuit switched NoCs in three areas, namely, connection setup method, time division multiplexing (TDM) technology and spatial division multiplexing (SDM) technology.Connection setup technique deeply inuences the architecture and performance of a circuit switched NoC, since circuit switched NoC requires to set up connections before launching data transfer. We propose a novel parallel probe based method for dynamic distributed connection setup. This setup method on one hand searches all the possible minimal paths in parallel. On the other hand, it also has a mechanism to reduce resource occupation during the path search process by reclaiming redundant paths. With this setup method, connections are more likely to be established because of the exploration on the path diversity.TDM based NoC constitutes a sub-category of circuit switched NoC. We propose a double time-wheel technique to facilitate a probe based connection setup in TDM NoCs. With this technique, path search algorithms used in connection setup are no longer limited to deterministic routing algorithms. Moreover, the hardware cost can be reduced, since setup requests and data flows can co-exist in one network. Apart from the double time-wheel technique for connection setup, we also propose a highway technique that can enhance the slot utilization during data transfer. This technique can accelerate the transfer of a data flow while maintaining the throughput guarantee and the packet order.SDM based NoC constitutes another sub-category of circuit switched NoC. SDM NoC can benefit from high clock frequency and simple synchronization efforts. To better support the dynamic connection setup in SDM NoCs, we design a single cycle allocator for channel allocation inside each router. This allocator can guarantee both strong fairness and maximal matching quality. We also build up a circuit switched NoC, which can support multiple channels and multiple networks, to study different ways of organizing channels and setting up connections. Finally, we make a comparison between circuit switched NoC and packet switched NoC. We show the strengths and weaknesses on each of them by analysis and evaluation.
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| 8. |
- She, Huimin, 1982-
(författare)
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Performance Analysis and Deployment Techniques forWireless Sensor Networks
- 2012
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Recently, wireless sensor network (WSN) has become a promising technology with a wide range of applications such as supply chain monitoring and environment surveillance. It is typically composed of multiple tiny devices equipped with limited sensing, computing and wireless communication capabilities. Design of such networks presents several technique challenges while dealing with various requirements and diverse constraints. Performance analysis and deployment techniquesare required to provide insight on design parameters and system behaviors.Based on network calculus, a deterministic analysis method is presented for evaluating the worst-case delay and buffer cost of sensor networks. To this end,traffic splitting and multiplexing models are proposed and their delay and buffer bounds are derived. These models can be used in combination to characterize complex traffic flowing scenarios. Furthermore, the method integrates a variable duty cycle to allow the sensor nodes to operate at low rates thus saving power. In an attempt to balance traffic load and improve resource utilization and performance,traffic splitting mechanisms are introduced for sensor networks with general topologies. To provide reliable data delivery in sensor networks, retransmission has been one of the most popular schemes. We propose an analytical method to evaluate the maximum data transmission delay and energy consumption of two types of retransmission schemes: hop-by-hop retransmission and end-to-end retransmission.In order to validate the tightness of the bounds obtained by the analysis method, the simulation results and analytical results are compared with various input traffic loads. The results show that the analytic bounds are correct and tight.Stochastic network calculus has been developed as a useful tool for Qualityof Service (QoS) analysis of wireless networks. We propose a stochastic servicecurve model for the Rayleigh fading channel and then provide formulas to derive the probabilistic delay and backlog bounds in the cases of deterministic and stochastic arrival curves. The simulation results verify that the tightness of the bounds are good. Moreover, a detailed mechanism for bandwidth estimation of random wireless channels is developed. The bandwidth is derived from the measurement of statistical backlogs based on probe packet trains. It is expressed by statistical service curves that are allowed to violate a service guarantee with a certain probability. The theoretic foundation and the detailed step-by-step procedure of the estimation method are presented.One fundamental application of WSNs is event detection in a Field of Interest(FoI), where a set of sensors are deployed to monitor any ongoing events. To satisfy a certain level of detection quality in such applications, it is desirable that events in the region can be detected by a required number of sensors. Hence, an important problem is how to conduct sensor deployment for achieving certain coverage requirements. In this thesis, a probabilistic event coverage analysis methodis proposed for evaluating the coverage performance of heterogeneous sensor networks with randomly deployed sensors and stochastic event occurrences. Moreover,we present a framework for analyzing node deployment schemes in terms of three performance metrics: coverage, lifetime, and cost. The method can be used to evaluate the benefits and trade-offs of different deployment schemes and thus provide guidelines for network designers.
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| 9. |
- Wang, Boqian, 1990-
(författare)
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High-Performance Network-on-Chip Design for Many-Core Processors
- 2020
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- With the development of on-chip manufacturing technologies and the requirements of high-performance computing, the core count is growing quickly in Chip Multi/Many-core Processors (CMPs) and Multiprocessor System-on-Chip (MPSoC) to support larger scale parallel execution. Network-on-Chip (NoC) has become the de facto solution for CMPs and MPSoCs in addressing the communication challenge. In the thesis, we tackle a few key problems facing high-performance NoC designs.For general-purpose CMPs, we encompass a full system perspective to design high-performance NoC for multi-threaded programs. By exploring the cache coherence under the whole system scenario, we present a smart communication service called Advance Virtual Channel Reservation (AVCR) to provide a highway to target packets, which can greatly reduce their contention delay in NoC. AVCR takes advantage of the fact that we can know or predict the destination of some packets ahead of their arrival at the Network Interface (NI). Exploiting the time interval before a packet is ready, AVCR establishes an end-to-end highway from the source NI to the destination NI. This highway is built up by reserving the Virtual Channel (VC) resources ahead of the target packet transmission and offering priority service to flits in the reserved VC in the wormhole router, which can avoid the target packets’ VC allocation and switch arbitration delay. Besides, we also propose an admission control method in NoC with a centralized Artificial Neural Network (ANN) admission controller, which can improve system performance by predicting the most appropriate injection rate of each node using the network performance information. In the online control process, a data preprocessing unit is applied to simplify the ANN architecture and make the prediction results more accurate. Based on the preprocessed information, the ANN predictor determines the control strategy and broadcasts it to each node where the admission control will be applied.For application-specific MPSoCs, we focus on developing high-performance NoC and NI compatible with the common AMBA AXI4 interconnect protocol. To offer the possibility of utilizing the AXI4 based processors and peripherals in the on-chip network based system, we propose a whole system architecture solution to make the AXI4 protocol compatible with the NoC based communication interconnect in the many-core system. Due to possible out-of-order transmission in the NoC interconnect, which conflicts with the ordering requirements specified by the AXI4 protocol, in the first place, we especially focus on the design of the transaction ordering units, realizing a high-performance and low cost solution to the ordering requirements. The microarchitectures and the functionalities of the transaction ordering units are also described and explained in detail for ease of implementation. Then, we focus on the NI and the Quality of Service (QoS) support in NoC. In our design, the NI is proposed to make the NoC architecture independent from the AXI4 protocol via message format conversion between the AXI4 signal format and the packet format, offering high flexibility to the NoC design. The NoC based communication architecture is designed to support high-performance multiple QoS schemes. The NoC system contains Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) and VC subnetworks to apply multiple QoS schemes to AXI4 signals with different QoS tags and the NI is responsible for traffic distribution between two subnetworks. Besides, a QoS inheritance mechanism is applied in the slave-side NI to support QoS during packets’ round-trip transfer in NoC.
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| 10. |
- Zhao, Xueqian, 1986-
(författare)
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Network on Chip : Performance Bound and Tightness
- 2015
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Featured with good scalability, modularity and large bandwidth, Network-on-Chip (NoC) has been widely applied in manycore Chip Multiprocessor (CMP) and Multiprocessor System-on-Chip (MPSoC) architectures. The provision of guaranteed service emerges as an important NoC design problem due to the application requirements in Quality-of-Service (QoS).Formal analysis of performance bounds plays a critical role in ensuring guaranteed service of NoC by giving insights into how the design parameters impact the network performance. The study in this thesis proposes analysis methods for delay and backlog bounds with Network Calculus (NC). Based on xMAS (eXecutable Micro-Architectural Specification), a formal framework to model communication fabrics, the delay bound analysis procedure is presented using NC. The micro-architectural xMAS representation of a canonical on-chip router is proposed with both the data flow and control flow well captured. Furthermore, a well-defined xMAS model for a specific application on an NoC can be created with network and flow knowledge and then be mapped to corresponding NC analysis model for end-to-end delay bound calculation. The xMAS model effectively bridges the gap between the informal NoC micro-architecture and the formal analysis model. Besides delay bound, the analysis of backlog bound is also crucial for predicting buffer dimensioning boundary in on-chip Virtual Channel (VC) routers. In this thesis, basic buffer use cases are identified with corresponding analysis models proposed so as to decompose the complex flow contention in a network. Then we develop a topology independent analysis technique to convey the backlog bound analysis step by step. Algorithms are developed to automate this analysis procedure.Accompanying the analysis of performance bounds, tightness evaluation is an essential step to ensure the validity of the analysis models. However, this evaluation process is often a tedious, time-consuming, and manual simulation process in which many simulation parameters may have to be configured before the simulations run. In this thesis, we develop a heuristics aided tightness evaluation method for the analytical delay and backlog bounds. The tightness evaluation is abstracted as constrained optimization problems with the objectives formulated as implicit functions with respect to the system parameters. Based on the well-defined problems, heuristics can be applied to guide a fully automated configuration searching process which incorporates cycle-accurate bit-accurate simulations. As an example of heuristics, Adaptive Simulated Annealing (ASA) is adopted to guide the search in the configuration space. Experiment results indicate that the performance analysis models based on NC give tight results which are effectively found by the heuristics aided evaluation process even the model has a multidimensional discrete search space and complex constraints.In order to facilitate xMAS modeling and corresponding validation of the performance analysis models, the thesis presents an xMAS tool developed in Simulink. It provides a friendly graphical interface for xMAS modeling and parameter configuring based on the powerful Simulink modeling environment. Hierarchical model build-up and Verilog-HDL code generation are essentially supported to manage complex models and conduct simulations. Attributed to the synthesizable xMAS library and the good extendibility, this xMAS tool has promising use in application specific NoC design based on the xMAS components.
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