An Integrated Cosimulation Environment for Heterogeneous Systems Prototyping

In this paper, we present a hardware-software cosimulation environment for heterogeneous systems. To be an efficient and convenient verification environment for the rapid prototyping of heterogeneous systems consisting of hardware and software components, the environment supports (i) modular cosimulation, (ii) cosimulation acceleration, and (iii) integrated user interface and internal representation. For modular cosimulation, we treat software and hardware components as separate processes that communicate with each other only through inter-process communication. We generate interface model automatically and insert between software and hardware components. We can accelerate cosimulation through hardware-emulation using FPGAs which also supports our incremental system prototyping strategy. Finally, to provide an integrated user interface and internal representation consistent with various prototyping tasks, we modified and extended Ptolemy, a cosimulation and cosynthesis environment for heterogeneous systems. The benefits of our cosimulation environment are as follows: expandability of the environment, target architecture and protocol independence, interface transparency, seamless transition to cosynthesis, cosimulation speedup, and convenient cosimulation. As experimental examples, we cosimulated and prototyped several heterogeneous systems successfully, which shows that our environment can be a useful heterogeneous systems specification/verification environment for fast prototyping.     

Prototyping convergence services

Asia is an interesting place to be. Interesting because it is different from everywhere else. Different not because of the enormous market potential being exploited by every company under the sun but different because its population has an almost universal thirst to explore and consume new technology to simplify their life or simply to make it more fun and intriguing. In contrast to the more conservative approach to adopting new technology across Europe, in the developed Asian economies you could classify almost everyone as an early adopter in European terms. It is like living in a ‘geek’ land where everyone wants to have the latest gadget in their hands or use the latest service on offer. A large percentage of the Asian youth is now living in an on-line, virtual world [1]. The future appears to be closer and come faster here, and European technology companies can learn a lot by analysing the technology trends in this region.     

Hardware-Software Prototyping from LOTOS

In this paper we present an extension to the co-design approach based on LOTOS presented in Fourth International Workshop on Hardware-Software Co-Design, 1996. In this new version we add a prototyping stage to our design flow, that allows to validate the design at the implementation level. We present the complete approach, stressing the prototyping stage after partitioning. An example of an Ethernet bridge serves us to illustrate our approach and present some results.     

SoC设计:虚拟原型成为主流

近期SoC的开发使虚拟原型对于软件和模型开发人员都更易于使用。本文阐述了虚拟原型验证技术将如何帮助数量不断增长的开发团队将更高质量的软件解决方案快速推向市场。     

RE与RPM技术在工程设计中的应用

简要介绍了逆向工程(RE)和快速原型(RPM)这两项产品设计制造的新技术及其设计产品的一般过程,并展望了其发展前景。     

Computational Environment for Simulating Lightning Strokes in a Power Substation by Finite-Difference Time-Domain Method

A computational environment was developed for simulating transient electromagnetic phenomena involving complex structures. The system is based on the finite-difference time-domain method and includes tools such as a graphical user interface, a 3-D structure visualization module, thin-wire formulation, dielectrics and metallic blocks, perfectly matched layers, voltage and current sources, creation of field distribution images, voltage and current calculations, among others, all of them associated with automatic domain division for parallel (distributed) processing. In this paper, this system is used for obtaining full-wave solutions, for the first time, of lightning surge interactions with the structural part of a power substation. Parameters such as transitory step and touch voltages and potential distribution on ground surface are calculated for 1 kA peak for the injected surge current.      

Scheduling for Concept-Oriented Rapid Prototyping

In this paper scheduling strategies for a rapid prototyping system are discussed. Our rapid prototyping system is able to deal with several CASE-tools and generate code for models of heterogenous domains. By using the emerging CASE Data Interchange Format CDIF the model data of CASE-tools is represented tool-independent. This tool-independent layer serves as a basis for analysis, simulation and code generation. The generated code is partitioned in tasks which must be scheduled as fast as possible using a real-time operating system to support high performance applications. We classify scheduling requirements for the constraints of rapid prototyping and present a new scheduling strategy called pseudo-rate scheduling which significantly improve the execution speed of rapid prototyping applications. Additionally, we provide a set of equations to estimate schedulability. Experimental results demonstrate the main advantages of our scheduling strategy.     

Model-Year Architectures for Rapid Prototyping

The Rapid Prototyping of Application-Specific Signal Processors (RASSP) program is changing the way engineers design embedded signal processors by providing a process that will reduce by at least a factor of four both the time-to-market and cost, and improve design quality. To achieve these improvements, Lockheed Martin's Advanced Technology Laboratories (ATL) is using a methodology that stresses hardware and software reuse, and model-year architectures that enable interoperability and upgrades through open interface standards. This paper describes ATL's model-year architecture, which defines a framework for reuse to enable low-cost technology upgrades for embedded processors. This approach can be applied to a wide range of military and commercial applications.     

基于FPGA的SoC原型验证的设计与实现

在SoC开发过程中,基于FPGA的原型验证是一种有效的验证方法,它不仅能加快SoC的开发,降低SoC应用系统的开发成本,而且提高了流片的成功率.文章主要描述了基于FPGA的SoC原型验证的设计与实现,针对FPGA基验证中存在的问题进行了分析并提出了解决方案.     

The Role of Development in Computational Systems

The development of a multicellular creature from a fertilised egg is a spectacular example of creating organised complexity. The egg is a single cell with little 'pattern' while the resulting adult organism consists of up to 10¹³ cells of many varieties and is exquisitely ordered, sculpted and patterned. The management of large, distributed, dynamic, interacting systems and the creation and elaboration of ever greater complexity are vital goals for future computational systems. What lessons can be learnt from nature's successes and how might those lessons begin to be applied to telecommunications problems? This paper focuses on biological examples which can offer inspiration and those examples are then linked to possible application domains.     

快速成型技术及应用

快速成型技术可以自动、直接、快速及精确地将设计思想转变为具有一定功能的原型或直接制造零件,是当今世界发展极为快速的先进制造技术.本文从原理、工艺过程以及实际应用等几个方面对快速成型技术进行了介绍.     

快速成形机理及其适用的激光光源

分析了快速成形过程的机理，给出了固化深度，固化线宽公式和适用的激光光源。     

Rapid Prototyping RFID Antennas Using Direct-Write

Optimization of radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags often requires several iterations of antenna design/fabrication/testing to meet cost and performance targets. The use of a rapid prototyping approach for antenna development would allow the designer an inexpensive and fast route to the refinement process. In this study, the performance of a commercial-off-the-shelf ultrahigh frequency (UHF) etched copper antenna was compared to printed silver antennas prepared by the following three direct-write techniques: maskless mesoscale materials deposition; matrix-assisted pulsed laser evaporation direct-write; and, collimated aerosol beam direct-write. The morphologies of the antennas were analyzed using contact and optical profilers with sheet resistance also being measured. Operational characteristics were determined by mounting silicon integrated circuits (IC) to the four different types of antennas. The performance of tags that utilized direct-write silver antennas was comparable to the copper-based commercial tag. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration where some of the direct-write rapid prototyping attributes (e.g., slight overspray, overlap of written lines, overall thickness less than 500 nm) are shown to not seriously impede RFID tag performance. These results demonstrate the utility of direct-write for rapid prototyping studies for UHF RFID antennas.      

Computational vision

Research is beginning to uncover fundamental computational principles underlying vision that apply equally to artificial and natural systems. These principles provide insights into the limitations of early machine vision systems and lay a foundation for building future systems capable of high performance in a broad range of visual domains. We present this emerging computational view of visual perception, discuss some early work in the field in its context, and put forward current thoughts on the overall organization and operation of a general-purpose computer vision system, synthesizing recent theoretical and experimental results.     

计算网格Portal的设计与实现

网格Portal就是网格的门户，网格Portal利用流行的Web技术提供Web界面方便用户运行网格应用程序．用户可以利用客户端浏览器通过网格Portal来方便安全透明地使用网格的各种计算资源。本文提出了计算网格Portal的设计技术和方法以及实现的功能，并分析了在设计中遇到的一些问题以及解决的办法。     

Prototyping of Tightly Coupled Hardware/Software-Systems

Verification and test issues raise the need for rapid prototyping of complex systems and especially hardware/software-systems. We tackle this problem by integration of hardware/software-codesign and prototyping. First we define the concept of the entire system architecture. This concept directs the hardware/software-partitioning process. Our prototyping environment reflects the architecture concept as well. In this overview the architecture concept and all important design tasks (hardware/software-partitioning, speed-up estimation before HW-synthesis, and prototyping of the entire hardware/software-system) are presented and compared to several approaches from literature. Thus a substantial overview over the prototyping problem is given. The latter part of this presentation illustrates our approach by a case study and presents the results. Our automated design process generates a tightly coupled hardware/software-system with very good performance characteristics. The case study focus on the prototyping of a ciphering algorithm. The reported approach leads to a reasonable overall system speed-up of 10 percent. Similar results have been found for further examples as well.     

Prototyping structural description using an inductive learningprogram

Character recognition systems can contribute tremendously to the advancement of the automation process and can improve the interaction between man and machine in many applications, including office automation, check verification and a large variety of banking, business and data entry applications. The main theme of the paper is the automatic recognition of hand-printed Arabic characters using machine learning. Conventional methods have relied on hand-constructed dictionaries which are tedious to construct and difficult to make tolerant to variation in writing styles. The advantages of machine learning are that it can generalize over the large degree of variation between writing styles and recognition rules can be constructed by example. The system was tested on a sample of handwritten characters from several individuals whose writing ranged from acceptable to poor in quality and the correct average recognition rate obtained using cross-validation was 89.65%     

机载多目标攻击武器系统虚拟样机研究

机载多目标攻击武器系统是当今航空武器系统研究的重点和发展的标志。该文论述了虚拟样机的概念及其在武器系统装备论证中的作用和意义,并研究了虚拟样机的基本设计技术。在给出机载多目标攻击武器系统总体和详细结构设计成果的基础上之上,文章进行了机载多目标攻击武器系统虚拟样机的设计研究,给出了样机的软、硬件结构。     

Guest Editor's Introduction: Rapid System Prototyping

The March, April, and May 2007 issues of IEEE Distributed Systems Online feature revised versions of the best papers presented at the 17th International IEEE Workshop on Rapid System Prototyping (RSP 06). These articles were selected by reviewers from a large selection of excellent submissions. "Gaining Insight into Executable Models during Runtime: Architecture and Mappings" by Philipp Graf and Klaus D. Muller-Glaser appears in the March issue. The article describes an extension to a model-based development approach that provides an architecture for debugging models that execute on target systems or in dedicated rapid-prototyping environments.