Dalbouchi Roukaya, Trabelsi Chiraz, Elhajji Majdi, Zitouni Abdelkrim
Laboratory of Electronics and Microelectronics, University of Monastir, Monastir 5000, Tunisia.
Learning, Data and Robotics Lab, ESIEA Engineering School, 94200 Paris, France.
Micromachines (Basel). 2023 Feb 19;14(2):481. doi: 10.3390/mi14020481.
The reconfigurable feature of FPGAs (Field-Programmable Gate Arrays) has made them a very attractive solution for implementing adaptive systems-on-chip. However, this implies additional design tasks to handle system reconfiguration and control, which increases design complexity. To address this issue, this paper proposes a model-driven design flow that guides the designer through the description of the different elements of a reconfigurable system. It is based on high-level modeling using an extended version of the MARTE (Modeling and Analysis of Real-Time and Embedded systems) UML (Unified Modeling Language) profile. Both centralized and decentralized reconfiguration decision-making solutions are possible with the proposed flow, allowing it to adapt to various reconfigurable systems constraints. It also integrates the IP-XACT standard (standard for the description of electronic Intellectual Properties), allowing the designer to easily target different technologies and commercial FPGAs by reusing both high-level models and actual IP-XACT hardware components. At the end of the flow, the implementation code is generated automatically from the high-level models. The proposed design flow was validated through a reconfigurable video watermarking application as a case study. Experimental results showed that the generated system allowed a good trade-off between resource usage, power consumption, execution time, and image quality compared to static implementations. This hardware efficiency was achieved in a very short time thanks to the design acceleration and automation offered by model-driven engineering.
现场可编程门阵列（FPGA）的可重构特性使其成为实现自适应片上系统极具吸引力的解决方案。然而，这意味着需要额外的设计任务来处理系统重构和控制，从而增加了设计复杂性。为解决此问题，本文提出了一种模型驱动的设计流程，该流程通过对可重构系统的不同元素进行描述来指导设计者。它基于使用MARTE（实时和嵌入式系统建模与分析）UML（统一建模语言）概要文件的扩展版本进行高级建模。所提出的流程既可以采用集中式也可以采用分散式重构决策解决方案，使其能够适应各种可重构系统约束。它还集成了IP-XACT标准（电子知识产权描述标准），允许设计者通过重用高级模型和实际的IP-XACT硬件组件轻松地针对不同技术和商用FPGA。在流程结束时，实现代码会从高级模型中自动生成。所提出的设计流程通过一个可重构视频水印应用作为案例研究进行了验证。实验结果表明，与静态实现相比，生成的系统在资源使用、功耗、执行时间和图像质量之间实现了良好的权衡。由于模型驱动工程提供的设计加速和自动化，这种硬件效率在很短的时间内就得以实现。
