Design and Implementation of a Source Code Profiling Toolset for Embedded System Analysis

The market needs for embedded or mobile devices were exploding in the last few years. Customers demand for devices that not only have high capacity of managing various complex jobs, but also can do it fast. Manufacturers therefore, are looking for a new field of processors that fits the special needs of embedded market, for example low power consumption, highly integrated with most components, but also provides the ability to handle different use cases. The traditional ASICs satisfied the market with great performance-per-watt but limited scalability. ASIP processors on the other hand, impact the new market with the ability of high-speed optimized general computing while energy efficiency is only slightly lower than ASICs. One essential problem in ASIP design is how to find the algorithms that can be accelerated. Hardware engineers used to optimize the instruction set manually. But with the toolset introduced in this thesis, design automation can be made by program profiling and the development cycle can be trimmed therefore reducing the cost. Profiling is the process of exposing critical parts of a certain program via static code analysis or dynamic performance analysis. This thesis introduced a code profiler that targeted at discovering repetition section of a program through static and dynamic analysis. The profiler also measures the payload of each loop and provides profiling report with a user friendly GUI client