Integrated Circuits and Systems Group

Prof. Luca Carloni
Department of Computer Science, Columbia University
Tuesday, February 23, 3:30pm, ACES 2.302

System-Level Design of Embedded Platform Architectures

The heterogeneous and distributed nature of many emerging classes of
embedded applications adds a new level of design complexity requiring the
deployment of tightly-interactive, concurrent processes on networked
platform architectures. While the design of a single component is
important, the critical challenges in the realization of a system-on-chip or a
distributed embedded system lie in the integration of the components. In
addressing these challenges we sustain that communication plays an
increasingly central role both at design time and run time. We present a
communication-based system-level design methodology that simplifies the
integrated design and validation of embedded platform architectures while
enabling important properties like modularity, scalability, flexibility, and
reusability. In particular, we argue how effective design space exploration
can be achieved through the decoupling of the design of the computational
elements and the synthesis of the communication infrastructure. For the
latter we present recent results on the design and optimization of
networks-on-chip.