Speaker

Location

The 10th IEEE Workshop on Design and Diagnostics of Electronic Circuits and Systems, Kraków, Poland

Date

April 11, 2007

Abstract

With complexities of Systems-on-Chip rising almost daily, the design community has been searching for new vision that can handle given complexities with increased productivity and decreased times-to-market. The obvious solution, such as increasing levels of abstraction, introducing variety of IPs or offering new design languages will not solve the problem but only prolong the present status of inefficiency and confusion. What is needed is a drastic change in design automation for complex systems that consist of software and hardware. In order to design such systems efficiently, we need a new approach with a new design flow, with new models with well defined semantics and a new formalism that will support system synthesis and verification of software and hardware.

In order to find the solution, we will look first at the system gap between SW and HW designs and derive requirements for the design flow that includes software as well as hardware. In order to enable new EDA tools for model generation, simulation, synthesis and verification, the design flow has to be well defined with unique abstraction levels, model semantics and model transformations corresponding to design decisions made by the designers. We will introduce the concept of model algebra that supports this approach and can serve as an enabler for the extreme makeover of EDA. We will support this concept with hard data and finish with a prediction and a roadmap toward the final goal of increasing productivity by several orders of magnitude while reducing expertise level needed for design of complex systems to the basic principles of design science only.

Biography

Daniel Gajski, a leader in the areas of embedded systems, design methodologies and languages, headed the research teams that created new design concepts, methodologies, tools and languages. He was instrumental in developing formalisms such as Y-chart, and numerous algorithms for high-level synthesis, the definition of the control-data-flow-graph (CDFG) and finite-state-machine with data (FSMD), system level languages such as SpecCharts and SpecC, and design tools such as SpecSyn and Embedded-System Environment. Many of these concepts have been adapted by academia and industry in the last 25 years.

Gajski directs the UCI Center for Embedded Computer Systems, with a research mission to incorporate embedded systems into automotive, communications, and medical applications. He has authored over 300 papers and numerous textbooks, including Principles of Digital Design (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1997) that has been translated into several languages.

He holds Dipl. Ing. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Zagreb, Croatia, and a doctoral degree in computer and information sciences from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. After 10 years as Professor at University of Illinois he has joined UCI, where he presently holds The Henry Samueli Endowed Chair in Computer System Design.