Introduction

 People

 Research themes:

   Embedded Systems

   Hybrid Systems

   Deep Submicron

   Logic Synthesis

 Other links:

   EE249

   CHESS

   GSRC

   BWRC

Protocol Design

Marco Sgroi, University of California at Berkeley
Alberto L. Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, University of California at Berkeley

The development of increasingly complex distributed systems is pushing the demand for new tools and methodologies to design communication protocols. Designing protocols is difficult due to the complexity of the task and the tight time-to-market requirements. The protocol design methodologies commonly used are rather informal 
since they involve a sequence of trial-and-error steps that terminate when the designers reach a certain level of confidence in their design. At the end of the process there is no guarantee that the implementation satisfies the requirements of the initial specification. Moreover, a careful performance analysis is usually not carried out, thus resulting in a limited design exploration, based mainly on designer experience. 
Our goal is to develop a methodology and a set of tools that allow the design of protocols that are functionally correct and efficient, while satisfying performance requirements and using a minimal amount of physical resources. 
The Ulysses approach is based on:
- a clear definition of the service requirements that the protocol should implement
- a set of models that formally describe protocols at different levels of abstraction (e.g. MSCs to describe the interaction of a protocol with its environment, PNs and FSMs to model the protocol internal behavior)
- a pre-defined library of common patterns, from which the designer selects a set of patterns that
match the given requirements
- a procedure to derive from a description of the protocol as a set of independent scenarios a more refined representation given in terms of a network of communicating processes, which optimizes performances and minimizes the amount of implementation resources.

Publications:

M. Sgroi, M. Sheets, A. Mihal, K. Keutzer, S. Malik, J. Rabaey, A. Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, Addressing System-on-a-Chip Interconnect Woes Through Communication-Based Design. Proceedings of the Design Automation Conference, DAC '01, Las Vegas, USA, June 2001. 

A. Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, M. Sgroi, L. Lavagno, Formal Models for Communication-based Design. Proceedings of the 11-th International Conference on Concurrency Theory, Concur '00, 22-25 August 2000. 

M. Sgroi, L. Lavagno, A. Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, Formal Models for Embedded System Design. IEEE Design & Test Magazine. Special Issue on System Design. June 2000.

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