Component - Based Technologies for HW/SW Co - Design

Proceedings of the 8th ACM/SPEC on International Conference on Performance Engineering, 2017

Nowadays embedded systems are powerful and everywhere. They implement complex functionality relying on a huge set of different hardware and software (HW/SW) architectures. In order to reduce their development effort, HW/SW Co-Design techniques are used during the entire development cycle. These techniques aim at helping designers to define a feasible hardware and software partitioning for the system in such a way that functional and non-functional requirements are fulfilled. In this context Design Space Exploration is a challenging activity since a huge number of different implementation alternatives need to be evaluated. By exploiting some intrinsic properties of the embedded system domain, in this paper we propose our vision for a novel Performance-Driven HW/SW Co-Design methodology. It combines: (i) the "design for verifiability" concept, suitable to model the system behaviour avoiding the state space explosion problem, and (ii) model-driven techniques to address performance issues. For this goal, we introduce the concepts underlying: (i) a novel formal modeling language and, (ii) a performance-driven verification/transformation chain.

Design Automation for Embedded Systems, 2002

We describe a compositional framework, together with its supporting toolset, for hardware/software co-design. Our framework is an integration of a formal approach within a traditional design flow. The formal approach is based on Interval Temporal Logic and its executable subset, Tempura. Refinement is the key element in our framework because it will derivefrom a single formal specification of the system the software and hardware parts of the implementation, while preserving all properties of the system specification. During ...

Design Automation for Embedded Systems, 1996

In this paper the design problems encountered when designing heterogeneous systems are studied and solutions to these problems are proposed. It will be shown why a single heterogeneous specification method ranging from concept to architecture is required and why it should cover issues as modularity, design for reuse, reuse of designs and reuse of design environments. A heterogeneous system design environment based on co-specification, co-simulation and cosynthesis is proposed and its application is illustrated by means of a spread spectrum based pager system.

2008

This paper demonstrates that the Model Driven Engineering approach is reliable for the development of codesign environments dedicated to embedded systems. From a UML model of a data parallel application, the Gaspard environment is able to generate an hardware accelerator which executes the modeled application. All the potential parallelism of a given application is modeled in UML and is exploited in order to generate a powerful hardware system. Gaspard is dedicated to intensive signal processing applications. Therefore, many automotive sector applications could benefit of the Gaspard environment.

Readings in Hardware/Software Co-Design, 2002

In this paper the design problems encountered when designing heterogeneous systems are studied and solutions to these problems are proposed. It will be shown why a single heterogeneous specification method ranging from concept to architecture is required and why it should cover issues as modularity, design for reuse, reuse of designs and reuse of design environments. A heterogeneous system design environment based on co-specification, co-simulation and cosynthesis is proposed and its application is illustrated by means of a spread spectrum based pager system.

2000

,Although the component-based software engineering is proven to be very successful in enterprise and desktop applications, it encounters some difficulties when applied to development,of embedded,systems. Specific requirements,like execution time, memory footprints, predictability etc., also known as extra-functional system properties, makes it difficult to use available component models for real-time and safety- critical applications. That arouses a need of domain

2006

Design of large dependable real-time embedded systems relies on integration of software elements onto a set of hardware nodes. In this paper an overall process of how to generate a Platform Specific Model (PSM) from a set of Platform Independent Models (PIM) and a hardware resource description is presented in the course of designing such embedded systems. Subsystems with different requirements are allocated and integrated onto shared hardware resources based on the constraints of the specified HW resources. The focus of this paper lies on developing the methodologies and tools for the generation of the PSM. Accordingly a dual-track approach has been proposed. First track is based on a transformational process and the second is a Multi Variable Optimization (MVO) approach.