EE382C Embedded Software Systems
Languages

Announcements

• Monday, January 26th, 2004, Computer Architecture Seminar Series, 3:30 PM, ACES 2.402, refreshments, "Measuring Benchmark Similarity and its Applications" by Dr. Lieven Eeckhout, Ghent University. Seminar series meets every Monday at 3:30 PM.
• Friday, January 30th, 2004, IEEE Spring Kickoff, 11 AM - 3 PM, job fair for summer internships and full-time positions in front of ENS with food provided. Bring resumes
• Friday, January 30th, 2004, Wireless Networking and Communications Seminar, 11 AM, ENS 637, refreshments, talk on "Asymptotic Methods in Wireless Communications: Which Way to Infinity?" by Prof. Michael Honig, Northwestern University. Seminar series meets every Friday at 11 AM.
• VLSI Seminar Series starts Wednesday, Feb. 4th, 3 PM. Regular meeting time is on Wednesdays at 5 PM.
• Sir C. Anthony R. Hoare, Professor Emeritus, Oxford University, developed Communicating Sequential Processes framework in which "multiple processors can communicate with each other through simple wires. This theory has been implemented by inmos in a programming language named occam, and in a microprocessor architecture known as the transputer." (from his online biography). Occam lives today in many forms, including Handel C. Using Handel C, Celoxica has developed a hardware/software codesign framework that will be at UT Austin in the System on a Chip class by Prof. Mark McDermott in Spring 2005. Dr. Hoare is currently with Microsoft Labs.
• Rosetta Stone

Lecture

• Lecture on Languages in PowerPoint and PDF formats
• Examples of non-determinism (from Prof. Edward Lee):
  • User interfaces require nondeterminism. For example, mouse clicks and keyboard presses are events that can be arbitrarily interleaved when sent to a handler.
  • Real-time applications also often require nondeterminism. Interrupts [esp. prioritized interrupts] are a usual way of managing this.

Supplemental Material

• System-level design concerns
  • cosimulation of a system specification that may be a mixture of algorithms, software components, and hardware components
  • cosynthesis of a system specification onto a specific hardware and software architecture, possibly including the generation of operating systems
  • codesign of a hardware and software architecture best suited for a class of systems (e.g., video compression)
• Goals of system-level design
  • coordinate the execution of and communication between subsystems.
  • meet global system-level constraints on throughput and delay, while possibly minimizing area and power: these are global optimizations.
• Contrast these global optimizations with the local optimizations performed by compilers for software or manually in optimizing cell designs in VLSI libraries. Compilers perform optimizations on a few lines of code in the same function.
• Introduction to System-Level Design
• EE313 Linear Systems and Signals (on-line lectures)
• Multirate signal processing slides as motivation for developing models of computation and communication