Mastering Heterogeneous Behavioural Models

Heterogeneity is one important feature of complex systems, leading to the complexity of their construction and analysis. Moving the heterogeneity at model level helps in mastering the difficulty of composing heterogeneous models which constitute a large system. We propose a method made of an algebra and structure morphisms to deal with the interaction of behavioural models, provided that they are compatible. We prove that heterogeneous models can interact in a safe way, and therefore complex heterogeneous systems can be built and analysed incrementally. The Uppaal tool is targeted for experimentations.Comment: 16 pages, a short version to appear in MEDI'201

An Enhanced Hardware Description Language Implementation for Improved Design-Space Exploration in High-Energy Physics Hardware Design

Detectors in High-Energy Physics (HEP) have increased tremendously in accuracy, speed and integration. Consequently HEP experiments are confronted with an immense amount of data to be read out, processed and stored. Originally low-level processing has been accomplished in hardware, while more elaborate algorithms have been executed on large computing farms. Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) meet HEP's need for ever higher real-time processing performance by providing programmable yet fast digital logic resources. With the fast move from HEP Digital Signal Processing (DSPing) applications into the domain of FPGAs, related design tools are crucial to realise the potential performance gains. This work reviews Hardware Description Languages (HDLs) in respect to the special needs present in the HEP digital hardware design process. It is especially concerned with the question, how features outside the scope of mainstream digital hardware design can be implemented efficiently into HDLs. It will argue that functional languages are especially suitable for implementation of domain-specific languages, including HDLs. Casestudies examining the implementation complexity of HEP-specific language extensions to the functional HDCaml HDL will prove the viability of the suggested approach

Concurrent Specification of Embedded Systems: An Insight into the Flexibility vs Correctness Trade-Off

Diseases & disorder

Guarded atomic actions and refinement in a system-on-chip development flow: bridging the specification gap with Event-B

Modern System-on-chip (SoC) hardware design puts considerable pressure on existing design and verification flows, languages and tools. The Register Transfer Level (RTL)description, which forms the input for synchronous, logic synthesis-driven design is at too low a level of abstraction for efficient architectural exploration and re-use. The existing methods for taking a high-level paper specification and refining this specification to an implementation that meets its performance criteria is largely manual and error-prone and as RTL descriptions get larger, a systematic design method is necessary to address explicitly the timing issues that arise when applying logic synthesis to such large blocks.Guarded Atomic Actions have been shown to offer a convenient notation for describing microarchitectures that is amenable to formal reasoning and high-level synthesis. Event-B is a language and method that supports the development of specifications with automatic proof and refinement, based on guarded atomic actions. Latency-insensitive design ensures that a design composed of functionally correct components will be independent of communication latency. A method has been developed which uses Event-B for latency-insensitive SoC component and sub-system design which can be combined with high-level, component synthesis to enable architectural exploration and re-use at the specification level and to close the specification gap in the SoC hardware flow

04491 Abstracts Collection -- Synchronous Programming - SYNCHRON\u2704

From 28.11.04 to 03.12.04, the Dagstuhl Seminar Perspectives Workshop 04491 ``Synchronous Programming - SYNCHRON\u2704\u27\u27 was held in the International Conference and Research Center (IBFI), Schloss Dagstuhl. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available