• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.699-707
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• 2016

This paper proposes a low-complexity central processing unit (CPU) that is suitable for deeply embedded systems, including Internet of things (IoT) applications. The core features a 16-bit instruction set architecture (ISA) that leads to high code density, as well as a multicycle architecture with a counter-based control unit and adder sharing that lead to a small hardware area. A co-processor, instruction cache, AMBA bus, internal SRAM, external memory, on-chip debugger (OCD), and peripheral I/Os are placed around the core to make a system-on-a-chip (SoC) platform. This platform is based on a modified Harvard architecture to facilitate memory access by reducing the number of access clock cycles. The SoC platform and CPU were simulated and verified at the C and the assembly levels, and FPGA prototyping with integrated logic analysis was carried out. The CPU was synthesized at the ASIC front-end gate netlist level using a $0.18{\mu}m$ digital CMOS technology with 1.8V supply, resulting in a gate count of merely 7700 at a 50MHz clock speed. The SoC platform was embedded in an FPGA on a miniature board and applied to deeply embedded IoT applications.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.50 no.5
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• pp.83-93
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• 2013

Recently, the SURF algorithm, which is conjugated for object tracking system as part of many computer vision applications, is a well-known scale- and rotation-invariant feature detection algorithm. The SURF, due to its high computational complexity, there is essential to develop a hardware accelerator in order to be used on an IP in embedded environment. However, the SURF requires a huge local memory, causing many problems that increase the chip size and decrease the value of IP in ASIC and SoC system design. In this paper, we proposed a way to design a SURF algorithm in hardware with greatly reduced local memory by partitioning the algorithms into several Sub-IPs using external memory and a DMA. To justify validity of the proposed method, we developed an example of simplified object tracking algorithm. The execution speed of the hardware IP was about 31 frame/sec, the logic size was about 74Kgate in the 30nm technology with 81Kbytes local memory in the embedded system platform consisting of ARM Cortex-M0 processor, AMBA bus(AHB-lite and APB), DMA and a SDRAM controller. Hence, it can be used to the hardware IP of SoC Chip. If the image processing algorithm akin to SURF is applied to the method proposed in this paper, it is expected that it can implement an efficient hardware design for target application.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.30 no.2A
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• pp.137-146
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• 2005

IP-based design methodology has been popularly employed for SoC design to reduce design complexity and to cope with time-to-market pressure. Interface modules for communication between system buses and IPs are required, since many IPs employ different protocols. Automatic generation of these interface modules would enhance designer's productivity and IP's reusability. This paper proposes an automatic interface generation system based on FSM generated from the protocol description of IPs. The proposed system provides the library modules for the standard buses to reduce the burdens of describing the protocols for data transfer from/to standard buses. Experimental results show that the area of the interface circuits generated by the proposed system had been increased slightly by 4.5% on the average when compared to manual designs. In the experiment, where bus clock is 100 Mhz and slave module clock is 34 Mhz, the latency of the interface had been increased by 7.1% in burst mode to transfer 16 data words. However, occupation of system bus can be reduce by 64.9%. A chip designer can generate an interface that improves the efficiency of system bus, by using this system.