System-level design: orthogonalization of concerns and platform-based design

TLDR

System‑level design challenges grow with increasingly complex integrated circuits and relentless time‑to‑market pressure, and platforms are essential to address them. The study seeks to develop reusable, abstraction‑level methodologies for system design, presenting concepts that could boost productivity and a modern platform‑based design approach using highly concurrent, software‑programmable architectures and tools. The authors propose a method that separates design stages to make them nearly independent, introducing architecture‑function co‑design and communication‑based design, and defining system platforms to manage complexity. They demonstrate the methodology by applying it to wireless system design and present a new platform‑based approach for modern embedded systems, compilers, architectures, and languages.

Abstract

System-level design issues become critical as implementation technology evolves toward increasingly complex integrated circuits and the time-to-market pressure continues relentlessly. To cope with these issues, new methodologies that emphasize re-use at all levels of abstraction are a "must", and this is a major focus of our work in the Gigascale Silicon Research Center. We present some important concepts for system design that are likely to provide at least some of the gains in productivity postulated above. In particular, we focus on a method that separates parts of the design process and makes them nearly independent so that complexity could be mastered. In this domain, architecture-function co-design and communication-based design are introduced and motivated. Platforms are essential elements of this design paradigm. We define system platforms and we argue about their use and relevance. Then we present an application of the design methodology to the design of wireless systems. Finally, we present a new approach to platform-based design called modern embedded systems, compilers, architectures and languages, based on highly concurrent and software programmable architectures and associated design tools.