Synopsys ARC MetaWare Toolkit for Infineon AURIX TC4x

The Synopsys ARC® MetaWare Toolkit for AURIX™ TC4x is a complete suite of tools, runtime software and libraries that provides everything needed to program the Parallel Processing Unit (PPU) on the Infineon AURIX TC4x family of microcontrollers. The PPU is an implementation of the Synopsys ARC EV71 Processor.

The toolkit consists of the MetaWare Development Toolkit, Neural Network Software Development Kit (NN SDK), and DSP and math libraries. In addition, the Toolkit also includes an AUTOSAR Complex Device Driver (CDD) for the Infineon TriCore microcontroller and a PPU Dispatcher to schedule tasks on the PPU.

The following table shows the main components of the MetaWare Toolkit for AURIX™ TC4x:

MetaWare Development Toolkit

The MetaWare Development Toolkit contains compilers, a debugger and PPU simulator. It includes the MetaWare C/C++ Compiler and MetaWare OpenCL C Compiler used to build applications and kernels to execute on ARC EV7x Processor-based PPU. The compilers support manual and automatic vectorization and provide methods for additional optimizations through software pipelining and control of instruction scheduling. The MetaWare Debugger is used to debug, profile, and optimize applications and kernels built with these compilers. ARC nSIM is an Instruction Set Simulator used for early software development such as algorithm development.

Simulink® Model-Based Design Support

The MetaWare Development Toolkit is compliant with Simulink® Model-Based Design flow. Model-based Design takes avantage of TC4x Hardware Support Packages. It allows users to develop algorithm at a higher level of abstraction. The Simulink® Model-Based Design flow automatically generates Vector DSP Library C code with highly-optimized library function calls to the the Parallel Processing Unit (PPU). The Vector DSP Library and Vector Linear Algebra Library are used as code replacement libraries to produce the optimized code that can then be compiled and run on the PPU.

DSP & Linear Algebra Libraries

The MetaWare Vector DSP library is a software library that provides a set of optimized software DSP functions that can ease the development of applications for the Vector DSP of the PPU. By using the library, you can benefit from applying pre-verified functions that have been optimized for the PPU.

The MetaWare Vector Linear Algebra Library is a software library of BLAS/LAPACK and supplementary algorithms. It is available in an OpenCL C and a C/C++ version. This library can be used to easily develop applications requiring linear algebra functions.

These libraries can be used by the MATLAB Plug-in for code replacement to produce highly optimized code for the PPU.

MetaWare NN SDK

The MetaWare NN SDK provides a Neural Network Compiler and runtime software to execute a neural network model on the PPU. The MetaWare NN Compiler takes a pre-trained model, implemented in the TensorFlow framework or available in the ONNX format, and compiles it to run on the PPU. It can also produce a standalone fixed-point model to aid in comparing the accuracy when moving from floating point to fixed point.

AUTOSAR CCD & LLD

The Complex Device Driver (CDD) provides PPU services to the Software Components (SWCs) of an AUTOSAR application. It is a driver for the TriCore processor that enables communication with the PPU. The Low-Level Device Drive (LLD) is a bare-metal version of the driver to support other non-AUTOSAR environments.

PPU Dispatcher

The PPU Dispatcher is a static library to communicate between a TriCore processor core and the PPU using the SPEED messaging module. The PPU Dispatcher runs on the PPU and provides scheduling and execution services requested by the TriCore processor. The PPU Dispatcher can also execute periodic tasks. An example application is provided to run and test the library on the Synopsys TC49 VDK.