SoCLog: A real-time, automatically generated logging and profiling mechanism for FPGA-based Systems on Chip

Abstract

Recent advances in FPGA technology and the proliferation of High Level Synthesis (HLS) tools makes it possible to implement complex System on Chip (SoC) designs that realize complete applications in a single FPGA device. To be able to exploit the large performance vs. area search space of such modern FPGA-based SoCs, system architects must have the appropriate performance analysis tools to evaluate-preferably at runtime-the computational requirements and the data flow of such a system to determine potential performance bottlenecks when running realistic workloads. In this paper we introduce SoCLog, a framework that automatically enhances the platform architecture with additional hardware components used to generate activity logs when the base SoC architecture executes an application. This real-time information can be analyzed by the system designer to expose performance bottlenecks not only on aggregate, but also at clock cycle granularity thus revealing potential design inefficiencies when there is burst of activity in the system. We evaluate our framework with a number of SoC designs to show that such a logging information can be valuable for the design of a complex SoC in a modern FPGA with minimal area overhead. © 2016 EPFL.