Welcome to Application-oriented Embedded System Technology

Application-oriented Embedded System Technology

       

Project leader:

Gajski Daniel, University of California Irvine, Center for Embedded Computer Systems (USA)

Project co-leader:

Vlado Sruk, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing (Croatia)

Project duration:

2007-12-01 to 2010-12-01 (Execution)

Project summary

Embedded systems today can be found in all walks of life - from cars, trains, phones, satellites, sensors, humans, environment, medical devices, smart homes to simple products such as refrigerator or parking meters. These embedded systems can be very complex consisting of several billion transistors or simple ones with only few million transistors. They have to satisfy different application and business requirements. Design of such systems is humanly impossible.

The design of embedded systems requires expertise in several areas: application, systems, software, hardware and fabrication. The most of the industrial companies designing embedded systems are fabless by contracting fabrication in the Far East countries such as Taiwan, Korea and China. For design creation and support the CAD companies from USA provide the commercial tools for physical and low level software and hardware design, modelling, synthesis and validation.

However, there is a large SW and HW gap between the application specific product specification and low level register transfer/instruction set tools provided by the CAD vendors. This gap requires extensive expertise in application, SW and HW which prevents small and medium size companies from successfully designing and competing in the world markets. CECS has developed new technology for design of embedded systems from high level application specification which generates the design for input to commercial tools. This technology achieves productivity gains of several orders of magnitude while requiring only expertise in the application area. The necessary computer science/computer engineering knowledge to use of these tools can be obtained through a 2-week workshop.

This research project proposes the transfer of the developed technology and tools to Croatia and their enhancement for Croatian economy. Small and large companies in Croatia will be able to design different application oriented embedded systems, send them for manufacturing to Far East and package the manufactured chips into various products without extensive knowledge of low level design. In this way Croatian companies can become competitive world wide.

Cooperation

Project under the Research Cooperability Programme of the Unity Through Knowledge Fund – UKF.