The diversity of the various embedded platforms and development environments calls for an efficient, but accurate way to provide customers with a good extrapolation on performance characteristics for their particular hardware configuration in the short term. This is where the Performance Estimation Tool (PET) comes in. The PET was derived from the testbench of cv act library/es. Instead of testing the fully functioning library, a small subset of core routines and functions was put together to build up the core of the tool. The PET is a project written in ANSI C and can be integrated by the customer into their environment for performance estimation purposes.

 

Download Performance Estimation Tool

 

How to Deploy Performance Estimation Tool

 

The library's easy portability provides a solid base for the creation of a tool to estimate execution timings of many of the algorithms and ciphers with adequate accuracy. The Performance Estimation Tool was extended by some additional modules for performance measurement and character output.

 

Both of these modules are important for this tool, but usually are heavily dependent on hardware features. Often the timer is realized in hardware by many micro controllers and the character output also depends on the development environment used. In order to keep the porting effort as low as possible, both modules are divided into hardware dependent and independent parts. This simplifies the porting to a great extent, since only a few lines of code need to be modified to be ready for a new platform.

 

There are mainly two tasks to be performed: first of all a new project for creating an executable from all the sources of the PET must be set up. Then the hardware specific timer and output functions need to be ported. Creating the project can either be done by using a development environment, adding all the source files of the PET and setting the appropriate include paths or by setting up some makefiles and using a standalone compiler and linker to create the executable. Running this executable on the target or in a simulator will create a logfile filled with data to estimate the overall performance of the algorithms of the cv act library.

 

The documentation delivered with the PET thoroughly describes all these steps, using simple and easily comprehendable examples. It also facilitates the work to target a new platform. Besides the example written for Microsoft Visual Studio, a template project is included to start a new project for a new platform. Extending the examples with some projects for freely available development environments is planned for the near future.