Platform-based Design for Embedded Systems and more

Alena Simalatsar, Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science, University of Trento, Italy

Abstract: Platform-based Design (PBD) methodology has been developed to overcome such problems of electronic system design as growing complexity of the design space, composition of heterogeneous components, and time-to-market pressure. It is based on the construction of different layers, called platforms, which represent different levels of the design abstraction. Each platform is a well-separated library of computational and communication components, where platforms at higher levels abstract the details of lower level platforms yet there is an associated transition from one platform to the next one.

Even so the Platform-based Design paradigm was initially developed as a methodology for electronics system design, now it is used in wider spectrum of research domains. For example, it was applied in development of domain-specific tools such as PSES (a power consumption evaluation framework for wireless sensor nodes), as well as to develop a synthetic biology ClothoCAD tool. It was used to perform a hierarchical evaluation of several existing methodologies and tools of embedded system design domain (COMBEST methodology).

This talk will give an introduction to the PBD methodology and the MetorII design framework that implements the ideas of PBD approach. It will also show the versatility of the PBD methodology when applying to various systems’ design and analysis.

About the speaker: received her PhD degree in Computer Science and Telecommunication from University of Trento in March 2009. She currently is a post doctorate researcher with the Embedded Electronics and Computing Systems (EECS) Group of the Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science at the same university. During her PhD studies Alena has spent six months as a visting scholar at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California at Berkeley, USA.

Her research interests include models and methodologies for embedded hardware and software development; wireless technologies and networked embedded systems: low-power sensors; techniques for circuit design and optimization; verification of hardware specifications with formal methods.