Carbon Performance Analysis Kits

Performance Analysis Made Easy

Performance analysis is a vital task in modern SoC design.  An under-designed SoC may run too slowly to keep up with the demands of system software.  An over-designed SoC will consume too much power and require more expensive IP blocks.  

Carbon Performance Analysis Kits™ (CPAK) are pre-built virtual reference platforms, complete with bare-metal and OS software which enable designers to be up and running withing minutes of download.

CPAK Features 

• Pre-built virtual prototypes featuring advanced processors such as the ARM® Cortex™-A15, Cortex-A9, Cortex-A7 and the ARM big.LITTLE subsystem
• 100% accurate models for critical performance elements including processors, fabric and memory controllers
• ARM Fast Model representations to enable application software development at millions of instructions per second
• Swap & Play™ to enable the ARM Fast Model representation to switch to 100% accuracy at any software breakpoint
• Bare-metal software package to initialize components and enable easy customization and benchmarking
• Linux and/or Android OS packages including source code 

Simple Customization

CPAKs are designed to be useful immediately after download, but not all SoCs are the same.  To better model the behavior of your actual SoC, CPAKs can also be easily customized using Carbon SoCDesigner Plus.  SoCDesigner Plus enables IP blocks to be reconfigured or replaced.   Additional blocks and subsystems can also be added to the system.  Designers are able to take advantage of the complete Carbon model ecosystem including models from Carbon IP Exchange, models compiled from RTL using Carbon Model Studio or handwritten models in C/C++ or SystemC.  Source code is also provided for all software components to enable easy customization.  CPAKs minimize the setup tasks typically associated with SoC design and enable engineers to focus their efforts in more productive areas.

Architectural Analysis

CPAKs are ideally suited for accurate architectural analysis.  They contain 100% accurate models compiled directly from RTL and instrumented for interactive design, debug and analysis.  CPAKs let you see the behavior of the actual silicon months before it is built.  This enables the designer to make architectural decisions with confidence.  CPAKs take advantage of all of SoCDesigner Plus's architectural analysis and visualizations tools to give the designer unmatched insight into actual SoC behavior.  

System Performance Optimization

Although many benchmarks execute on a bare-metal system, a large number of them require an OS to be present.  Traditionally this presents a problem because the cycle accurate models which are so beneficial for bare metal benchmarks and optimization are simply too slow to be used with an OS.  Even booting an OS on a platform containing only cycle accurate models can take days.   

CPAKs for the Linux and Android OS solve this problem by using Carbon's Swap 'n Play technology.  This enables the OS to boot in seconds and get to the software area of interest for performance analysis.  The system representation is then swapped to be 100% accurate (for all or just part of the system) and execution continues.  This technique enables accurate benchmarking and optimizations to take place even 

Unmatched IP Integration

Your SoC design doesn't just use IP from a single vendor.  Your virtual prototype representaion shouldn't either.  CPAKs can easily accomodate additional third party IP models.  These models can either be added to the CPAK platform or used to replace a delivered component.  Future CPAKs will also include select third party IP to futher accelerate the integration process.