Sts 401 slides-doin

Case Study: Alfa Instrumentos Multicore Industrial Instrumentation

Thursday, April 25, 13

Design West 2013

Case Study: Alfa Instrumentos Mul=core Industrial Instrumenta=on

Jonny Doin -‐ Principal Engineer


Industrial Instrumenta.on

Case Study

In this class a Case Study will be shown of a family of Industrial Instrumenta.on systems developed in the course of the last 4 years.

Some design decisions will be discussed, along with basic Architectural and Methodology aspects.

The results will be shown in the form of some performance and field data.


Case Study

Agenda

• Aspect Oriented Design

• Mixed Signal Hardware Design

• Asymmetric Mul. Core

• Bare-‐Metal Firmware

• Event-‐Driven Programming

• Sta.c Memory Alloca.on

• Hardware/Firmware co-‐design

• Some performance data


Case Study

Aspect Oriented Design

AOD is more commonly found in large VLSI circuit design.

• Design paradigm that decomposes a logic design into concerns, and analyzes the cross-‐cuOng concerns between design units;

• We loosely apply AOD concepts into all levels of our designs, from mixed-‐signal hardware design, PCB rou.ng, and firmware design;

• AOD enabled us to do parallel implementa.on of hardware and firmware, allowing several engineers to work on the same design, accelera.ng design cycles;


Case Study

Aspect Oriented Design

AOD also helps maintaining integrity of large firmware projects.

• Correct aspect decomposi.on ensures scalability of the logic design, by helping to maintain modularity and concern separa.on;

• Recogni.on of aspect cross-‐cuOng level is important to achieve high modularity and design reuse;

• Helps to maintain design integrity along the evolu.on and maintenance;

• Helps to realize the scalability of a given architecture;


Case Study

Mixed-‐Signal Hardware Design

For precision instrumenta.on, you need precision mixed-‐signal techniques.

• Selec.ng suitable components is just part of the answer;

• Ground and power domains have to be carefully designed;

• EMC and EMI/RFI techniques for the Industrial environment;

• Minimiza.on of self-‐inflicted noise;

• The PCB itself is the most important electronic component of a system;

• Correct handling of the analog design will help achieve datasheet performance of ADCs and SPICE models;


Case Study

Asymmetric Mul.-‐Core

In mission cri.cal systems, resilience and failure containment are key factors to high reliability.

• Separa.on of subsystems into different cores isolates processing domains;

• Different subsystems have different processing needs;

• Failure containment at subsystem level is facilitated;

• Core applica.on is isolated from external threats;

• Higher modulariza.on, helps deriva.ve models;

• Fieldbus communica.ons, TCP/IP hardware, USB D/H, DSP;


Case Study

Bare-‐Metal Firmware

Industrial mission-‐cri.cal systems have severe constraints on down.me. Component reliability is a key factor that affects the en.re produc.on chain.

• We decided for a bare-‐metal architecture as a means of full control of the firmware implementa.on;

• Fast reac.on to fixing design flaws and bugs is essen.al;

• However, a high level of abstrac.on and modularity is employed;

• OOD is used throughout the system;


Case Study

Event-‐Driven Architecture

We use an event-‐driven architecture, similar to the processing paradigm of a Hardware Descrip.on Language simulator.

• Sequen.al processes are executed when input signals change;

• The use of processes and signals to describe firmware result in a processing paZern that achieves cpu load balancing;

• It also results in a clear separa.on of aspects, helping to maintain modularity and fostering design reuse;

• Is very scalable, allowing systems of 100s of thousands of lines of code to be managed with low local complexity;


Case Study

Sta.c Memory Alloca.on

It is paramount in a mission cri.cal system that resource starva.on never occurs.

• RAM alloca.on is the most cri.cal resource;

• Dynamic alloca.on regimes with high availability can be very difficult to verify:

• Usage paZerns cannot be reliably covered for all cases;

• Memory leak and fragmenta.on can s.ll occur;

• A sta.c memory alloca.on guarantees worst case scenario and helps achieve full verifica.on of the logic;


Case Study

Hardware/Firmware co-‐design

Using the AOD techniques, and highly modular firmware, full Hardware/Firmware co-‐design was possible.

• Firmware is developed ahead of hardware;

• Tes.ng and integra.on yields almost 100% compliance on first integra.on tests;

• The process reduces cost of deriva.on of new products;

• Reuse of hardware subsystems is reflected in reuse of firmware subsystems;


Case Study

Some examples

-‐ ADC, Ethernet,-‐ USB Host/Dev,-‐ Fieldbus,-‐ Cortex-‐M4


Case Study

Some examples

-‐ High res ADC,-‐ Profibus,-‐ ARM7


Case Study

Some examples-‐ Weigh Indicator,-‐ Very robust-‐ Heavy-‐duty environments


Case Study

Some examples

-‐ Subcircuits are designed, prototyped and tested as separate circuits, and are used in the main development of finished products.-‐ PCB-‐level IP-‐ Allows many engineers working in the same PCB design


Case Study

Some Performance Data

Using the exposed techniques (AOD, OOD, Co-‐Design, Event-‐Driven Architecture), some important results have been achieved:

• Extremely low field defect rate;

• High design reuse, in diverse equipment lines;

• Fast spinoff of new boards;

• Full parallel development process, with several engineers working at the same .me in the same project subsystem;

• Very high level of uniformity in the logic descrip.on, even for large designs;

• Maintained high quality of implementa.on, recognized by the customers;


Design West 2013

THANK YOU

Jonny Doin

[email protected]


mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

Sts 401 slides-doin

Technology

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