A model-driven design environment for embedded systems

Abstract

Welcome to San Francisco and the 43rd Design Automation Conference! San Francisco is an excellent venue for DAC, with its proximity to many high-tech companies, its beautiful location, and a wide variety of activities and sights. DAC's return to San Francisco after eight years of absence promises a lively and especially well-attended event. Thousands of executives, managers, designers, academics, journalists, and others are converging here during DAC, the largest and most prestigious event focused on the design of electronic circuits and systems.The technical program, which received a record 865 regular paper submissions, includes hot topics such as low power, DFM, and ESL among many others. This year, it sees an increase in design papers and includes two new topics: beyond-the-die, and emerging technologies. Overall, the program contains more than 200 technical presentations in 11 tracks, eight technical program panels, seven special sessions, and seven fullday tutorials -all led by widely respected industry experts. Full-day tutorials are being held Monday and Friday, and cover a wide range of topics including DFM, verification, ESL, embedded systems, chip-package co-design, and test.DAC is highlighting a special MEGa theme -Multimedia, Entertainment, and Games -found throughout the program in all three keynotes, several pavilion sessions, and in a full day of technical sessions on Wednesday. Topics will range from issues faced in the design of the iPod, to technology requirements for 3D graphics in feature films, to power management for next-generation media applications. This promises to be an exciting part of the program as the topic is timely, exposes cutting-edge problems, and touches everyone's lives.Three keynote addresses will be held this year. Monday's keynote is Joe Costello, appearing nearly 10 years after leaving his post as Cadence's CEO. His recent endeavor has been serving as Chairman of Orb Networks, Inc., a company working to bring media to mobile devices, and his talk will focus on today's macro consumer trends. Tuesday's keynote is Hans Stork, Senior Vice President and CTO of Texas Instruments Inc., who brings a wealth of experience and knowledge in process technologies. He will address issues in the sub-50nm processes that enable SoCs in mobile communication devices of the future. On Thursday, DAC welcomes Alessandro Cremonesi, VP of Strategy and System Technology and General Manager of Advanced System Technology at STMicroelectronics, who has been leading ST's efforts in SoC design. He will deliver a keynote on the challenges of convergence -handling the increased complexity at the system, embedded software, and silicon implementation level.DAC has again organized Management Day to be held Tuesday, offering mid-and senior-level design managers a forum for sharing information on technology trends and decision-making processes.The exhibit floor is crowded and will be lively with more than 240 exhibitors. On the floor, be sure to visit the DAC pavilion which returns with a full schedule of 18...

SystemC/C-based model-driven design for embedded systems

“…The proposed design methodology, originally sketched in Riccobene et al [2005aRiccobene et al [ , 2007a for the hardware components but here explained in the light of a global hardware-software codesign view, aims at applying the MDA approach to get for the embedded system development the same benefits as in software development. A MDA-based system development process relies on the notion of modeling and automated mapping of models to implementations.…”

“…This approach is based on automatic model transformations from SystemC UML graphical models into abstract state machine (ASM) [Börger and Stärk 2003] formal models, and exploits ASM model validation by simulation and scenario construction. A validation tool integrated into the existing model-driven codesign environment [Riccobene et al 2006b] to support the proposed validation flow is also available. It is based on the ASMETA toolset [Gargantini et al2008a;ASMETA 2009]-a set of tools around ASMs.…”

Scenario-based validation of embedded systems

“…The overall co-design environment presented in [24] works as front-end for consolidated lower level co-design tools, and is intended to assist the designer across the refinement steps in the modelling activity, from a highlevel functional UML model of the system down to the SystemC RTL. Fig.…”

“…no strong skills and expertise on formal methods are required to the user. We also present the validation tool integrated into the model-driven HW-SW co-design environment originally presented in [24] to support the scenario-based validation flow. As a proofof-concept, the paper reports the results of the scenariobased validation for the well-known Simple Bus case study from the SystemC distribution.…”

“…Sect. 3 briefly reminds the model-driven HW-SW co-design environment architecture of [24] and its components features. Sect.…”