ESE 566: Hardware/Software Co-Design of Embedded Systems Fall 2005

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ESE 566 Hardware/Software Co-Design of Embedded
SystemsFall 2005 Instructor Dr. Alex Doboli.

• Paper discussed in class D. Verkest, K. Van
  Rompay, I. Bolsens, H. De Man, CoWare A Design
  Environment for Heterogeneous Hardware/Software
  Systems,
• Design Automations for Embedded Systems, Vol. 1,
  No. 4, pp. 357-386, 1996.

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Brief description of the paper content

• What means heterogeneous system? What is the
  difference from codesign point-of-view between a
  heterogeneous and a homogeneous system?
• What are communicating processes? What is
  encapsulation? What is refinement? Why separation
  between data processing and communication?
• What design aspects are discussed in the paper?

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The context of the work

• Why an environment for managing different
  component types? Would such an environment be
  more a research or technology development effort?
• What is the common denominator for designing with
  heterogeneous components? What is refinement of
  processes? What is refinement of communication?
  What challenges do you see in the refinement
  process?

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Description of CoWare

• Describe the concept of separating functionality
  from communication. Why does this help
  reusability?
• System components as processes. What are
  primitive processes? What are hierarchical
  processes? Process behavioral interface
  implementation Process context several
  threads. How does this model relate to the
  implementation?
• What is a port? What is a primitive port? What
  is a hierarchical port? What is a protocol?What
  means in, out, inout? What means master and
  slave?

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Example

• Discuss the example in Figure 2.
• How does channel refinement work for the example?
• Summary of communication mechanisms in CoWare.

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HW/SW Co-Design in CoWare

• When a component is reused pay attention to
  communication part!
• Methodology is presented in Figure 4. What are
  the inputs? What is INLINER? Why do we need
  INLINER?
• How is software compiled? Why is C code converted
  into VHDL?
• What is SHOCK?