A Design Metatool Supervised by Prof. ALBERTO SANGIOVANNI-VINCENTELLI Rong Chen Mentors: Roberto Passerone, BassamTabbara

The Problem l Current design tools n are powerful n can achieve different design goals l But, they n need users to help them interact with each other n hide inner design flow from users

Project Objective l Design a metatool to n capture different tools’ characteristics n show the design flow to users n make tools interact by themselves n be user-friendly (GUI)

Tool-Description Model l Describe tool characteristics n name n inputs and their formats n outputs and their formats n commands and options n etc.

Tool-Description Model l Build a tool-description model n language: UML n tools: Together/J n current model: small (a couple of classes) n expected model: large (many classes and packages) n scalability: good

Tool-Description Model PolisTool DataBase build-sgsg-to-c association instance dependence class object Together/J visual design name command...

Tool-Description Model Public class PolisTool { public string name; private string command;... private DataBase database1; } Public class DataBase { } … automaticaly genarated codes Together/J

Design Flow Navigation l Internal model dependency esterelshiftpartition build-sg build-blif o.s. c file code size run time sw hw

Design Flow Navigation l Given input, find out all possible outputs n start from input node, visit all following nodes, then show nodes l Given input and output, find out design flow n start from input node, search output node, then show the path l Given output, find out necessary input n start from output node, retrieve all preceding nodes, then show nodes

Automated Tool Interaction l Objective n once given requirements, the whole design will be automatically carried out l Approach n the metatool interacts with O.S., gets run-time environment, launches different tools

Automated Tool Interaction metatool... Unix command Polis Ptolemy VCC call done not done yet

Implementation l Language: Java n for good transportation l GUI design tool: AWT n for good transportation

Remarks l The core of the whole work is to build a proper tool-description model l Formal specification method (UML) is highly recommended here to maintain good scalability

Future Works l Future works n tool-description model needs to be further extended to include more tools n Inner data model needs to be developed to handle intermediate results n Enhanced GUI features are needed