Turning Coders into Makers: The Promise of Embedded Design Generation
Rohit Ramesh, Richard Lin, Antonio Iannopollo, Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, Bjoern Hartmann, Prabal Dutta

Citation
Rohit Ramesh, Richard Lin, Antonio Iannopollo, Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, Bjoern Hartmann, Prabal Dutta. "Turning Coders into Makers: The Promise of Embedded Design Generation". Symposium on Computational Fabrication, ACM, 9, June, 2017.

Abstract
As personal fabrication becomes increasingly accessible and popular, larger number of makers, many without formal training, are dabbling in embedded and electronics design. However, existing general-purpose, board-level circuit design techniques do not share desirable properties of modern software development, like rich abstraction layers and automated compiler checks. These facilitate powerful tools that ultimately lower the barrier to entry for programming, by allowing a higher level of design-separating usage from implementation-and providing automated guidance and feedback. In this paper, we present a novel methodology for embedded design generation that allows the generation of complete designs from high-level specifications. We present an implementation capable of synthesizing a variety of examples to show that our approach is promising. Starting from user-specified requirements and a library of available components, our tool encodes the design space as a system of constraints. Off-the-shelf solvers then reason over these constraints to produce a block diagram containing sufficient information to generate the finalized device firmware and circuit netlist.

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Citation formats

• HTML

  Rohit Ramesh, Richard Lin, Antonio Iannopollo, Alberto
  Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, Bjoern Hartmann, Prabal Dutta.
  <a
  href="http://www.terraswarm.org/pubs/945.html"
  >Turning Coders into Makers: The Promise of Embedded
  Design Generation</a>, Symposium on Computational
  Fabrication, ACM, 9, June, 2017.

• Plain text

  Rohit Ramesh, Richard Lin, Antonio Iannopollo, Alberto
  Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, Bjoern Hartmann, Prabal Dutta.
  "Turning Coders into Makers: The Promise of Embedded
  Design Generation". Symposium on Computational
  Fabrication, ACM, 9, June, 2017.

• BibTeX

  @inproceedings{RameshLinIannopolloSangiovanniVincentelliHartmann17_TurningCodersIntoMakersPromiseOfEmbeddedDesignGeneration,
      author = {Rohit Ramesh and Richard Lin and Antonio
                Iannopollo and Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli and
                Bjoern Hartmann and Prabal Dutta},
      title = {Turning Coders into Makers: The Promise of
                Embedded Design Generation},
      booktitle = {Symposium on Computational Fabrication},
      organization = {ACM},
      day = {9},
      month = {June},
      year = {2017},
      abstract = {As personal fabrication becomes increasingly
                accessible and popular, larger number of makers,
                many without formal training, are dabbling in
                embedded and electronics design. However, existing
                general-purpose, board-level circuit design
                techniques do not share desirable properties of
                modern software development, like rich abstraction
                layers and automated compiler checks. These
                facilitate powerful tools that ultimately lower
                the barrier to entry for programming, by allowing
                a higher level of design-separating usage from
                implementation-and providing automated guidance
                and feedback. In this paper, we present a novel
                methodology for embedded design generation that
                allows the generation of complete designs from
                high-level specifications. We present an
                implementation capable of synthesizing a variety
                of examples to show that our approach is
                promising. Starting from user-specified
                requirements and a library of available
                components, our tool encodes the design space as a
                system of constraints. Off-the-shelf solvers then
                reason over these constraints to produce a block
                diagram containing sufficient information to
                generate the finalized device firmware and circuit
                netlist.},
      URL = {http://terraswarm.org/pubs/945.html}
  }
  

Posted by Mary Stewart on 9 May 2017.
Groups: tools