ESE 566: Hardware/Software Co-Design of Embedded Systems Fall 2005  Instructor: Dr. Alex Doboli. Paper discussed in class: M. Chiodo, P. Giusto, A. Jurecska, H. Hsieh, A. Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, L. Lavagno, “Hardware-Software Codesign of Embedded Systems”, IEEE Micro, 1994.

Brief description of the paper content What is the paper discussing?

The context of the work What kind of applications are the authors considering? How are these applications different from those enumerated in the paper on Cosyma? What existing limitations are addressed in this work? Are presently these limitations still there? What other alternative solutions exist to this problem? Do you think that the approach could be used for other types of applications also?

Description of the proposed solution Summarize the solution proposed by the authors. What is the basic model used in design? What are events? How is task communication achieved? What is the codesign problem? What trade-offs are there explored? What is the methodology? What performance constraints are the authors considering? What is the target architecture for their implementation? How does a hardware or a software implementation of a CSFM look like?

Description of the proposed solution What are the claims of this work? What are the limitations of the approach? Do you think that these limitations can be solved?

System Modeling How is the system modeled? What is the granularity of the description (tasks/blocks/instructions/operations)?What language constructs are needed? What language constructs cannot be handled? Are these limitations important? Do you see a solutions to address these limitations? How is hardware described? How is software described?

Codesign Finite-State Machines What are the characteristics of CFSMs? How do CFSMs relate to the implementation? What design activities are the characteristics useful for? What is nondeterminism? Analyze the seat-belt example in Figure 1.

Synthesis of CFSM Networks Do you see any requirements for input specifications in VHDL etc? How is hardware-software partitioning achieved? How is hardware implemented? How is software implemented? What is an s-graph? What kind of optimizations are performed in the flow?

Synthesis of CFSM Networks What are the requirements for the real-time OS? What kind of validation is performed?

Discussions What are the limitations of the approach? Summarize the work and its merit. Ideas for improving the work?