• Management of complexity and heterogeneity
• Simulation
• Synthesis

The Web as an Electronic Design Automation Tool

• Distributed design tools
• Object-oriented design
• Desktop access to the latest tools [WELD]

• Software costs such as data size, program size, throughput, and power consumption
• Hardware costs such as area, weight, throughput, and power consumption

• Multiprocessor scheduling [Ptolemy Project Papers] [Architecture Trade Tool]
• Hardware/software codesign [Kalavade and Lee] [POLIS]
• Low-power design [Survey] [Hyper] [Concept] [Pleiades]
• Benchmarking [Berkeley Design Technology]

Hidden from the User

Products with Embedded Systems

• Audio CD players and music synthesizers
• Disk drives
• Digital cellular phones
• Sonar and radar
• Video disk players and video telephones

Perform Signal Processing, Communications, and Control

Embedded Software Systems [Graduate Course]

• Fall between microcontrollers and the fastest general-purpose processors in terms of processing power and power consumption
• One cycle execution for most instructions
• Zero-overhead looping
• Hardware multiplier(s)
• Extended precision accumulator
• Separate data and program memory on separate busses
• Special addressing modes
• Various data formats:
  • fixed-point such as the TMS320C50 and Motorola 56000 families (comparison)
  • non-IEEE floating-point such as the TMS320C30 family
  • IEEE floating-point such as the ADSP-21020
• Pipelines with hardware interlocking protection
• Compiler tools are generally not very efficient

• Leverage existing simulators or disassemblers
• Validate them to be cycle-accurate and bit-true
• Extend them to support different boards and hypothetical configurations
• Return implementation cost estimates
• Make portable across computer platforms
• Report pipeline hazards

• Separate the user interface from the kernel
• Add hooks to configure the parent process(es) that controls it
• Support pipes by flushing all output

• Based on the validated disassembler for the C30 DSK board
• Written in C++ that has been run through Purify
• Run simulator in lock step with the C30 DSK board to verify state

• Can be controlled by a parent process
• User can use textual commands

• Runs under MS-DOS, Windows, and Unix

• Instruction set architecture simulation
• Supports the C30 non-IEEE floating-point format
• Models state of the C30 processor including the pipeline

• Simulates about 80,000 C30 instructions/sec on a 167 MHz UltraSparc
• Reasonable for interpreted simulation

• First freely distributable C30 simulator
• Changes to the underlying C30 DSK tools have been rolled into C30 DSK tool releases

New CG Target Parameters

• Show memory usage?
• Show run time?

Benchmarking of Dual-Tone Modulated-Frequency Decoders [Paper]

• Finite State Machine Editor
• Schematic Editor for the Synopsys Design Compiler
• Real-Time Package for Java

• Sluggish telnet access to two C30 boards and two C50 boards
• For demonstration purposes
• No clean way to transfer files

• Java Applets implement the graphical user interface
• Server is written in Java
• Applets communicate with the server over a socket
• Server manages the command-line simulators
• The Applets configure the menus and display based on information returned by the simulator

• Tested on Unix platforms and Windows '95
• Should run on all platforms that support Java
• Release expected in April of 1997
• Preliminary proof-of-concept demonstration installed at UT Austin

• Provide measures of implementation costs
• Cooperate with system-level design tools and graphical user interfaces

Ptolemy Targets Track Implementation Costs

• Ptolemy 0.7 will track software implementation costs for the 56000
• Profiling performance of blocks of C code in systems [Pino]
• Hooks exists for tracking hardware implementation costs

Web-Enhanced, Configurable Users Interfaces

• Simulators
• Debuggers

Last Updated 03/23/97.