An Educational Environment for Designing and Performance Tuning of Embedded Systems

Teaching how to design and tune an embedded system is indeed a difficult task, since the student has to learn the many trade-offs that lead to the final system configuration. Existing tools are often too complex, or do not stress the basic steps in the design path. These steps are very useful during the first training sessions. The environment Csim2, which is used at our university, permits the student to become familiar with concepts of pro-gram locality, cache structure and performance tuning, while analyzing actual data produced by the actual software that has to be tied with the embedded system. The student can analyze program behavior by means of locality graphs, or run extensive parametric simulations in order to find the best configuration that minimize either sys-tem cost, power consumption, or execution time. Further op-timizations allow the designer to explore more sophisticated features like selective cacheing, cache locking, scratch memory, and code mapping for better cache exploitation. In this paper we show the basic capabilities of the environment, and some example of training sessions. By means of graphs about program locality and performance metrics