Design Environment for Dynamically Reconfigurable Embedded Systems

Modern high-performance embedded systems, such as Automatic Target Recognition for Missiles or Dynamic Protocols Mobile Communications devices, face many challenges. Power and volume constraints limit hardware size. Accurate, high-performance algorithms involve massive computations. Systems must respond to demanding real-time specifications. In the past, custom application-specific architectures have been used to satisfy these demands. This implementation approach, while effective, is expensive and relatively inflexible. Hardwired application-specific architectures fail to meet requirements and become expensive to evolve and maintain. A fixed, application specific architecture will require significant redesign to assimilate new algorithms and new hardware components. Flexible systems must function in rapidly changing environments, resulting in multiple modes of operation. On the other hand, efficient hardware architectures must match algorithms to maximize performance and minimize resources. Structurally adaptive, reconfigurable architectures can meet both these needs, achieving high performance with changing algorithms. Reconfigurable computing devices, such as Field Programmable Gate Arrays allow the implementation of architectures that change in response to the changing environment. Efficient system architectures must encompass a heterogeneous mix of the best technologies. The target systems are built on a heterogeneous computing platform: including configurable hardware, ASIC and general-purpose processors and DSPs. The primary difficulty in a heterogeneous, reconfigurable approach lies in system design. A designer must now maintain a set of diverse system architectures, which exist at different times in the system's lifetime, and map these architectures onto the same group of resources. The designers must manage the behavior of the system, determining the operational modes of the system, the rules for transitioning between operational modes, and the functional properties within each operational mode. In addition, the system must make efficient use of the resources, enabling the designer to minimize the envelope of hardware required to support the union of all operational modes. Current system design tools are insufficient to manage this complexity. High-level design tools are being developed to capture designs and to generate functional systems as part of the DARPA Adaptive Computing Systems Program. This presentation describes a model-integrated approach to be used in the development of reconfigurable systems. There are many significant issues in the development process. The approach described here divides these issues into several categories: (1) Representation and Capture of design information in terms of Models; (2) Analysis of the models for design/requirements/resource trade-off studies; (3) Synthesis of architectures and executable systems directly from the models; and (4) Runtime support environments to support efficient …