Performance analysis and design space exploration for high-end biomedical applications: challenges and solutions

ABSTRACT

High-end biomedical applications are a good target for specific-purpose system-on-chip (SoC) implementations. Human heart electrocardiogram (ECG) real-time monitoring and analysis is an immediate example with a large potential market. Today, the lack of scalable hardware platforms limits real-time analysis capabilities of most portable ECG analyzers, and prevents the upgrade of analysis algorithms for better accuracy. Multiprocessor system-on-chip (MPSoC) technology, which is becoming main-stream in the domain of high-performance microprocessors, is becoming attractive even for power-constrained portable applications, due to the capability to provide scalable computation horsepower at an affordable power cost. This paper illustrates one of the first comprehensive HW/SW exploration frameworks to fully exploit MPSoC technology to improve the quality of real-time ECG analysis.

REFERENCES

• 1: Fuster, V., Epidemic of Cardiovascular Disease and Stroke: The Three Main Challenges, Circulation, Vol. 99, Issue 9, March 1999, 1132--1137.
• 2: Jovanov, E., Gelabert, P., Adhami, R., Wheelock, B., Adams, R., Real Time Holter Monitoring of Biomedical Signals, In Proceedings of the DSP Technology and Education Conference (DSPS'99), Aug 1999, Houston, Texas.
• 3: Vojin G. Oklobdzija , Ram K. Krishnamurthy, High-Performance Energy-Efficient Microprocessor Design (Series on Integrated Circuits and Systems), Springer-Verlag New York, Inc., Secaucus, NJ, 2006
• 4: Fuster, V. Epidemic of Cardiovascular Disease and Stroke: The Three Main Challenges, Circulation, Vol. 99, Issue 9, March 1999, 1132--1137.
• 5: Pan, J. and Tompkins, W., A Real-Time QRS Detection Algorithm, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, Vol. BME-32, No. 3, March 1985.
• 6: Hung, K., Zhang, Y. T., and Tai, B. Wearable Medical Devices for Tele-Home Healthcare, In Proceedings of the 26th Annual International Conference on the IEEE EMBS, San Francisco, CA, USA, September 1-5, 2004.
• 7: Dong Jun , Zhu Hong-hai, Mobile ECG Detector through GPRS/Internet, Proceedings of the 17th IEEE Symposium on Computer-Based Medical Systems, p.485, June 24-25, 2004 [doi>10.1109/CBMS.2004.63]
• 8: FreescaleTM semiconductor, Personal Electrocardiogram (ECG) Monitor, http://www.freescale.com/
• 9: Harland, C., Clark,T., and Prance, R. High resolution ambulatory electrocardiographic monitoring using wrist-mounted electric potential sensors, Measurement Science and Technology, Vol. 14, 2003, 923--928.
• 10: Simone Medardoni , Martino Ruggiero , Davide Bertozzi , Luca Benini , Giovanni Strano , Carlo Pistritto, Interactive presentation: Capturing the interaction of the communication, memory and I/O subsystems in memory-centric industrial MPSoC platforms, Proceedings of the conference on Design, automation and test in Europe, April 16-20, 2007, Nice, France
• 11: Mirko Loghi , Federico Angiolini , Davide Bertozzi , Luca Benini , Roberto Zafalon, Analyzing On-Chip Communication in a MPSoC Environment, Proceedings of the conference on Design, automation and test in Europe, p.20752, February 16-20, 2004
• 12: Mirko Loghi , Massimo Poncino , Luca Benini, Cycle-accurate power analysis for multiprocessor systems-on-a-chip, Proceedings of the 14th ACM Great Lakes symposium on VLSI, April 26-28, 2004, Boston, MA, USA [doi>10.1145/988952.989049]
• 13: Andrea Bona , Vittorio Zaccaria , Roberto Zafalon, System Level Power Modeling and Simulation of High-End Industrial Network-on-Chip, Proceedings of the conference on Design, automation and test in Europe, p.30318, February 16-20, 2004
• 14: STBus Interconnect, STMicroelectronics: STBus main features, www.st.com/stonline/products/technologies/soc/stbus.htm
• 15: Bruno Bouyssounouse , Joseph Sifakis, Embedded Systems Design: The ARTIST Roadmap for Research and Development (Lecture Notes in Computer Science), Springer-Verlag New York, Inc., Secaucus, NJ, 2005
• 16: Poletti Francesco , Poggiali Antonio , Paul Marchal, Flexible Hardware/Software Support for Message Passing on a Distributed Shared Memory Architecture, Proceedings of the conference on Design, Automation and Test in Europe, p.736-741, March 07-11, 2005 [doi>10.1109/DATE.2005.156]
• 17: Aaron Segal: EKG tutorial, EMT-P, 1997, http://www.drsegal.com/medstud/ecg/
• 18: Iyad Al Khatib , Francesco Poletti , Davide Bertozzi , Luca Benini , Mohamed Bechara , Hasan Khalifeh , Axel Jantsch , Rustam Nabiev, A multiprocessor system-on-chip for real-time biomedical monitoring and analysis: architectural design space exploration, Proceedings of the 43rd annual conference on Design automation, July 24-28, 2006, San Francisco, CA, USA [doi>10.1145/1146909.1146947]
• 19: ARM DAI 0033A Note 33: Fixed Point Arithmetic on the ARM, September 1996.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.3 SPECIAL-PURPOSE AND APPLICATION-BASED SYSTEMS
      Subjects: Microprocessor/microcomputer applications

Additional Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.3 SPECIAL-PURPOSE AND APPLICATION-BASED SYSTEMS
      Subjects: Real-time and embedded systems

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation, Performance

Keywords:
biomedical, design space exploration, electrocardiogram algorithms, multiprocessor system-on-chip, realtime analysis