From SW Timing Analysis and Safety Logging to HW Implementation: A Possible Solution with an Integrated and Low-Power Logger Approach

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The goal of this paper, as exposed by the authors, is to analyze a real implementation, based on a RISC-V use-case, obtained with Vivado 2018, for a Xilinx Ultrascale+ FPGA.

The paper present in detail the problems, current limitations and challenges of researchers regarding the Hardware, Execution Tracing, RISC-V ISA and Safety based on ISO 26262.

For each point mentioned in the contribution paragraph (section 4), authors identify also the part in the manuscript considers that point. Please Quantify the main contribution in the abstract, introduction and conclusion sections, compared to other authors' articles.

Section 1 and 2 contains a well-structured introduction and related work chapter. The articles from related work are not recent. A comparison with other projects presented in section 2 is necessary to qualitatively increase the level of the article and the contribution made in the field.

It is recommended to cite articles and not websites (see [12-18].)

Figure 6 (and Figure 7) need to be revised, presenting in detail the Safety Peripheral and the Proxy (also the resolution is different).

The authors indicate that the FPGA resources used are those reported by Vivado after Post Implementation (data from Table 4).

Is the performance better on this multi-core compared to a HW-RTOS? (like https://www.renesas.com/us/en/software-tool/hw-rtos)

The results are sufficiently presented, successfully presenting the obtained data and power reports described in section 7 obtained with Vivado 2018.

The reference section need to be revised.

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Thank you for your kind revision of our manuscript.

We revised the contribution part and improved the abstract, introduction and conclusion sections.
We improved the related works sections by considering novel research articles, even though few implementation details are available for integrated technologies.
We improved figures quality and updated their descriptions to clarify the content.
On our side, we do not have knowhow on HW-RTOS, but this can be a starting point for a further investigation of the implementation.
We revised the simulation results and presented them in a more clear way.

Kind regards,

FC

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper proposes a configurable hardware device in the scope of building a coherent data log. The paper can be improved by addressing the following:

1- The abstract needs some revision to reflect some of the results obtained in this study.

2- The authors are encouraged to add an additional 2-3 keywords.

3-The paper's contribution is better to be presented as 4-5 bullet points that describe things precisely.

4- Many of the references used are links rather than research studies, hence the authors are encouraged to add an additional five to ten recent references.

5- A table of acronyms will enhance the quality of the paper.

The paper has many grammatical errors and the authors need to have the paper proofread or edited by an editing service.

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Thank you for the revision of our manuscript.

We improved the abstract according to your suggestions and also added a couple of keywords.
Unfortunately, it is difficult to recover many publication about the implementation of integrated technologies. Therefore, we left the hyperlinks as references in order to facilitate the reader to reach such available implementations. Moreover, additional related works regarding logging devices have been included in the manuscript.

Kind regards,

FC

Reviewer 3 Report

The paper presents a complete hardware log system based on a central 379 device (DLU) and some slave appendixes (Proxies).

In general, the system is not presented professionally in the paper. The requirements and needs of this system have to be discussed.

The figures are not well explained in the paper.

The related work does not completely cover the previous studies in this field.

The performance evaluation section has to show the benefits of this study in a better and more interesting way. 

The English needs extensive improvements.

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Thank you for your revision of our manuscript.

We extensively revised the manuscript in order to improve the quality of the English language.

We improved the requirements and needs of this system, trying to address the scope in a more clear way.
We also improved the quality and the description of the figures.
We included additional recent related works.
We tried to cover as much as possible the research topic, but, at the best of our knowledge, no integrated devices' details can be found in the literature.
Finally, we revised the performance evaluation section to present in a better way the results and the corresponding benefits.

Kind regards,

FC

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Thank you very much for providing responses to all my previous concerns.  The paper was improved by the revision process.