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This wiki documents the STHEM utilities found in the STHEM GitHub repository. STHEM has been developed within the TULIPP EU Project.

For a quick start, jump to the Tutorial which will guide you through the most important aspects of the STHEM toolchain.

The TULIPP project focuses on making the process of developing embedded image processing systems more efficient. These systems often include conflicting goals, such as high performance and low energy consumption. They frequently use heterogeneous processing resources to meet the requirements, and they can be quite complex to design. The TULIPP project aims to provide tools, reference platforms, example applications and guidelines to aid the designers of these kinds of systems.

The TULIPP Toolchain: STHEM

High-productivity development of low-power image processing applications on reconfigurable platforms requires mature tool support. The purpose of the tools is to help the developer focus on core application development by automating recurring, but critical, tasks such as performance instrumentation, design space exploration and vendor tool configuration. In other words, the tools support the developer in efficiently carrying out the iterations of the generic development process and thereby reduces the time it takes to arrive at an implementation that meets power and performance requirements. Thus, we are adopting a broad definition of the word toolchain by including any tool that improves the efficiency of executing the development process.

The TULIPP toolchain is called STHEM - an acronym for Supporting uTilities for Heterogeneous EMbedded image processing platforms. At a high-level, STHEM contains two types of tool packages:

• Vendor Tools (VTs): VTs are existing, industry-grade tool packages that are critical to enable the development process on a particular platform, and they are commonly supplied by platform vendors or third-party companies.

• Utilities: Utilities are smaller tool packages provided by the TULIPP project that are designed to resolve limitations in existing VTs, or to provide extra functionality not available in the VTs. The utilities especially focuses on supporting development of energy efficient embedded image processing applications.

Contents

• The Generic Development Process
• Vendor Tools:
  • Xilinx SDSoC 2017.4 (external link)
  • HIPPEROS (external link)
• Utilities:
  • Analysis Utility
  • Power Measurement Utility
  • Dynamic Partial Reconfiguration Utility
  • HiFlipVX
• Tutorial
• Version history

Using STHEM for Research

If your use of STHEM results in a publication, we would appreciate that you acknowledge this by citing our ARC'18 paper:

"Supporting Utilities for Heterogeneous Embedded Image Processing Platforms (STHEM): An Overview", Ahmad Sadek, Ananya Muddukrishna, Lester Kalms, Asbjørn Djupdal, Ariel Podlubne, Diana Goehringer and Magnus Jahre, In Proc. of the International Symposium on Applied Reconfigurable Computing (ARC), 2018.