On cost-effective reuse of components in the design of complex reconfigurable systems

Design strategies that benefit from the reuse of system components can reduce costs while maintaining or increasing dependability—we use the term dependability to tie together reliability and availability. D3H2 (aDaptive Dependable Design for systems with Homogeneous and Heterogeneous redundancies) is a methodology that supports the design of complex systems with a focus on reconfiguration and component reuse. D3H2 systematizes the identification of heterogeneous redundancies and optimizes the design of fault detection and reconfiguration mechanisms, by enabling the analysis of design alternatives with respect to dependability and cost. In this paper, we extend D3H2 for application to repairable systems. The method is extended with analysis capabilities allowing dependability assessment of complex reconfigurable systems. Analysed scenarios include time-dependencies between failure events and the corresponding reconfiguration actions. We demonstrate how D3H2 can support decisions about fault detection and reconfiguration that seek to improve dependability while reducing costs via application to a realistic railway case study

Layout area models for high-level synthesis

Traditionally, the common cost functions, the number of functional units, registers and selector inputs, are used in high level synthesis as quality measures. However, these traditional design quality measures may not reflect the real physical design. To establish quality measures based on the physical designs, we propose layout estimation models for two commonly used data path and control layout architectures. The results show that quality measures deriving from our models give an accurate prediction of the final layout. The results also show that traditional cost functions are not good indicators for optimization in high level synthesis