The design of embedded computing systems, such as video-enabled mobile phones and reliable medical devices, faces a serious productivity gap due to the increasing complexity of their hardware and software, as well as hard design constraints, including strict timing, multi-core functionality, low power and price, and short time-to-market. One solution to address this problem is the modeling at h...

The system specification support environment presented in this paper, PROSPEX (Product Specification Expert), supports the RT-SA methodology. It not only provides graphic support for drawing, but also helps the engineer in the analysis and design process itself. PROSPEX analyses the quality and correctness of the RT-SA diagrams using knowledge-based techniques. PROSPEX also includes features fo...

W ith the increasing deployment of computers as embedded systems that provide new and interesting services, the computing landscape is much richer and more diverse than it was even a decade ago. Developers can choose from an enormous variety of hardware, operating systems, and tools for the embedded systems they build. This range of platform and tool choices provides both a blessing and a curse...

Information Technology (IT) Security is often focused on Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability of software and data (information) contained in networked computers, servers and storage devices. In embedded industrial control or Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems the security focus must be on the protection of the availability of the system’s functions. This basic para...

The power consumption of a digital circuit can be reduced by decomposing it into sub circuits which can be turned off when inactive. Power can also be reduced by careful state encoding. Clock-gating techniques have been shown to be very effective in the reduction of the switching activity in sequential logic circuits. Modeling a given circuit as a finite-state machine, we formulate its decompos...

INTRODUCTION This chapter will address the issues of interface design and incorporation of human behavior factors into the design process. The traditional process engineering approach to software development embeds interface design as a task component. However, the interface design process has grown as a discipline and is beyond the single process within a larger scheme that may be lost on the ...

Flight control computers are traditionally designed as custom-built, which results in long development cycle, high full life-cycle costs and inconvenient maintenance. Commercial off-theshelf (COTS) technologies are showing outstanding performance, reliability and developing period in various applications. This paper details the development and test of a digital fly-by-wire system implemented wi...

The Systems Engineering Department at the U.S. Naval Academy provides a set of courses that are designed to introduce modern practices in digital control to undergraduates majoring in Systems Engineering. A very important element of digital control to be taught is the use of microcontrollers as “embedded” elements in feedback control systems. A good simulation of a real microcontroller can be i...

Fixed networks of limited resource heterogeneous computers need to allow applications to access remote devices in order to overcome any local resource deficiencies. Current operating systems would use a file system, network stack and middleware to implement such access but the volume of functionality involved can be a barrier to performance. This paper examines the 2.4 series Linux kernel to sh...

design space exploration, VLIW, systolic array, cache This paper addresses the problem of automated design of a computer system for an embedded application. The computer system to be designed consists of a VLIW processor and/or a customized systolic array, along with a cache subsystem comprising a data cache, instruction cache and second-level unified cache. Several algorithms for "walking" the...