2 :0 0 p m - 6 :0 0 p m
TUTORIAL VI
Title: Architecture Exploration for Embedded System Design
Rajeev Kumar and P.P. Chakrabarti
Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur

Audience: The tutorial is intended for practicing engineers in the area of embedded system design. It is also very informative for engineering students and professionals with interests in processor architecture, design languages, transaction level modeling and system software. Prior exposure to computer organization & architecture, and EDA tools is a plus though not very essential.

Course Description: Technology and market trends indicate that the emerging designs are targeted towards System-on-Chip (SoC) solutions for most embedded applications. The primary focus of such design work is to gain design wins in select applications by extensibility. Such architecture can allow a seamless transition from a baseline core to a high-performance core that implements an extended instruction set. Additionally, hardware accelerators in the form of DSP chips, Codecs, ASICs and other additional processors - multimedia and wireless chips can be plugged on as well-defined interfaces and possibly to a heterogeneous multiprocessor system. In this technological scenario, a major focus of the industry is towards reducing turn-around time from design to market.

This tutorial provides - (i) an introduction to basic concepts and techniques of Design Space Exploration (DSE) cycle, (ii) an in-sight into the design flow of an embedded system and the decision parameters, (iii) an understanding of the different abstraction levels of the design flow, and (iv) a familiarity with the software tools used and developed/ generated for the DSE.

Key design considerations to developing embedded systems will be looked into and followed with a few case-studies specific to RISC architecture. In general, the tutorial is aimed at quickly laying a foundation that can be used as the basis for further study, research and system-development in wide ranging techniques and needs for various applications.

Lecturer(s): Rajeev Kumar is an Associate Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur. Prior to joining IIT, he worked for Birla Institute of Technology & Science, Pilani and Defence Research & Development Organization, Govt. of India. He received his Ph.D. from University of Sheffield, and M.Tech. from University of Roorkee (now, IIT – Roorkee) both in Computer Science & Engineering. His main research interests include Flexible software tools for embedded systems, Multimedia systems, Evolutionary algorithms, and Object-oriented computing. He is a member of ACM, senior member of IEEE and a fellow of IETE.

P. P. Chakrabarti is a Professor of Computer Science & Engineering and Dean of Sponsored Research & Industrial Consultancy (SRIC) at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur. He received his Ph.D. and B.Tech. form IIT-Kharagpur both in Computer Science & Engineering. His main research interests include CAD for VLSI, Embedded System Design and Artificial Intelligence. He is a fellow of Indian National Science Academy, New Delhi, Indian Academy of Science, Bangalore and The West Bengal Academy of Science & Technology, and senior member of IEEE. He is a recipient of the prestigious Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar award.