Modelling & Design for Heterogeneous Embedded Systems
On Thursday 19 May 2011, 30 people from academia and industry joined international guest speakers from the European Artemis project SYSMODEL for this open ICES seminar, held in collaboration with the Swedish National Real-Time Association.
SYSMODEL is an ARTEMIS supported initiative to allow small and medium enterprises to build cost-efficient heterogeneous embedded systems with high performance, high confidence, reduced time to market and faster deployment. It combines the power of an open source industrial system design language, SystemC, with a formal design framework. This ensures that system models are applicable to formal analysis and design exploration. Although SYSMODEL targets SMEs, the SYSMODEL design flow can also be applied in larger companies.
In SYSMODEL, system design starts with the development of a heterogeneous system model using the SYSMODEL SystemC libraries for different models of computation. This allows to model and co-simulate systems that contain both digital and analog hardware, and software.
SYSMODEL uses the concept of wrappers to (1) integrate legacy code into the system model, and (2) to enable a refinement-by-replacement approach. Processes in the system model can be replaced by lower-level implementation code that runs on a simulator (VHDL) or an executable platform (target processor) and co-simulates with the abstract model. Design exploration methods assist the designer during system refinement using parameters that are provided by the SYSMODEL platform architecture framework.
This seminar presented the main foundations of the SYSMODEL project, offering an overview of the SYSMODEL design process and industrial experiences so far.
Host Ingo Sander (KTH) opened with a talk on the concepts for the modelling of heterogeneous systems, followed by explanations from Hosein Attarzadeh (KTH) and Mikkel Jakobsen (Technical University of Denmark) on modelling them in SystemC.
Jan Madsen (Technical University of Denmark) talked of Design Space Exploration. Sanna Määttä (Tampere University of Technology) detailed the platform architecture framework. Iyad Al Khatib and Arshad Iqbal (Solidux Telecom AB) shared experiences from industry.
You can read an Event Summary from ICES PhD student Ananya Muddukrishna and the talks as pdfs in the right hand column.
