Electronic Systems Design Seminar
http://www-cad.eecs.berkeley.edu/esd-seminar

	Compiling multithreaded programs to SoC hardware and software Per Ljung Codetronix   Monday, September 8, 2003, 4:00pm-5:00pm 540AB Cory Hall (DOP Center Classroom)

Abstract

Modern deep-submicron processes enable an extremely large number of devices per die, but design and manufacturing costs limit production to ultra-high-volume designs. As a result, the majority of future SoC designs may consist of user-programmable replicated structures such as FPGA and RISC cores. The Xilinx Virtex2Pro with large a FPGA and 4 PPC processors is such an example. Simultaneously designers need new design tools to deliver such a SoC within shorter market windows.

 

This talk presents the prototype tool called Mobius, which compiles an algol-like statically-allocated multi-threaded language to hardware and/or software. Based on the CSP-methodology, threads synchronize and communicate enabling hardware and software to interact seamlessly. The generated software is ANSI-C or assembler, and has a built-in scheduler. The generated hardware is synthesizable verilog, and uses handshaking circuits resulting in a globally asynchronous / locally synchronous (GALS) system which minimizes timing closure issues. The ease of designing large systems and Quality-of-Results experiments show that Mobius is quite attractive compared to hand-coding.

Speaker

Per Ljung is the founder of CodeTronix LLC where he is developing rapid prototyping tools for SoC hardware and software.

 

As a Berkeley graduate student, Ljung founded Coyote Systems in 1996 to develop MEMS design tools. He was Principal Investigator under a DARPA contract to develop a fast 3D field solver using accelerated boundary element method, which became both a MEMS product and an EDA capacitance extraction product licensed to Analog Devices, Infineon, Monterey Design, Simplex and others. The MEMS tool was acquired by Coventor, and Cadence/Simplex acquired the EDA tool in 2000 and 2001, respectively.

 

At Berkeley, Ljung developed a vibrating MEMS gyroscope with integrated BICMOS electronics, and graduated (MechEng PhD) in 1996. He is a Hertz fellow, and has several patents in the MEMS and EDA fields.