Performance analysis of embedded systems in the virtual component co-design environment

Due to the increasing complexity of embedded systems in terms of functionality and architectural resources available to meet performance and cost criteria, there is an added responsibility on the designer to make the right choices. These choices can differ in terms of different hardware/software partitions, different types of architectural components, different communication architectures etc. and each choice meets certain performance metrics up to certain level. In this paper, we are exploring the design space to analyze different choices of design implementations by quantitative estimation of performance during simulation. Multicriteria decision making (MCDM) methods are used to rank our choices. To demonstrate the validity of the above exploration technique, a codesign tool from Cadence - virtual component codesign (VCC) is used. It gives us the flexibility to create the experimental frame setup and probes to measure the performance metrics during simulations. The tradeoffs between performance metrics are performed by MCDM. A safety critical example is chosen to demonstrate our approach.