My current research focuses on issues and the complexities involved in writing SoC specification.
Research Summary:
To overcome the complexities in today's
System-on-Chip (SoC) design, researchers have developed sophisticated
design environments that significantly reduce design and
development time through automation. Typically, a SoC design is
specified in a system-level description language (SLDL) at a high
abstraction level, called a specification model. This model is then
step-wise refined down to an implementation with the help of automated
(or semi-automated) synthesis tools.While much research has focused on SoC synthesis tools, little has been done to support the designer in coming up with the initial specification model. In fact, studies on industrial-size examples (MP3 decoder, GSM vocoder ...) have shown that even in the presence of algorithms given in C code, 90% of the system design time is spent on coding and re-coding of the specification model in SLDL. Moreover, the quality of the golden specification model has tremendous impact on the cost and quality of the resulting system implementation. Thus, creating and optimizing the specification model is a critical task towards successful SoC design.
It is the goal of this research project to
- Identify tasks in system specification and re-coding which are suitable for automation.
- Design and develop prototype tools for
- specification generation
- automated re-coding
- source code optimization
- Demonstrate the benefits using real-life examples