Flexible modelling and performance debugging of real-time embedded multimedia systems

Real-time multimedia applications today represent the predominant workload in embedded devices ranging from set-top boxes to mobile phones and PDAs. However, implementing and performance tuning of such applications on embedded architectures is a challenging problem. On one hand, such architectures are increasingly becoming complex, with multiple processors, different kinds of memory subsystems and diverse on-chip communication architectures. On the other hand, designers of embedded devices, as well as application developers targeting such devices are faced with stringent performance constraints and time-to-market pressures. This has led to a lot of interest in (i) generic System-on-Chip (SoC) platform or template architectures which can be easily tuned for the application at hand, (ii) techniques for rapidly mapping/developing applications for such architectures, (iii) models and tools for analyzing and performance debugging of such implementations. This tutorial will provide a comprehensive overview of the recent developments in this area. It will be helpful to students, researchers, application developers and engineers who have a background in traditional real-time multimedia applications and would like to get an overview of the important issues and solutions pertaining to developing and performance debugging of multimedia applications for embedded SoC platforms.