Hardware / Software System Engineering is the common denominator of research projects pursued at the Institute for Integrated Systems. Our manner of hardware / software systems engineering covers the development of new architectures for application-specific multicore processors (MPSoC) and distributed embedded systems, as well as techniques and methods for complexity governance and co-optimization of functional and different non-functional performance metrics. Last but not least, we devise tools to assess performance, power and reliability characteristics of such systems during early phases of design (HW/SW Codesign) for the sake of a successive improved architecture development.

Architectures

Architecture deals with the structural composition of a system from its base components. MPSoC components consist of RISC CPU cores, memory and I/O controllers, DMA units, hardware accelerators and coprocessors as well as standardized interconnect structures and interfaces. Application requirements determine type, number and topology of the components which are assembled to MPSoC architectures.

Hardware components for multicore processors in:

Network-on-Chip (NoC):

Methods

Methods are concerned with the conceptual approaches and techniques to achieve specified optimization goals. Safety of a technical system can, for example, be improved by triplication of components followed by a majority voting on the individual results (Triple Modular Redundancy). Alternatively, machine learning techniques can be used to sense deviations from the expected behavior as part of an overall self-organizing system. These are two conceptually different approaches, or methods, for achieving the same goal. Methods, in general, aren’t isolated or independent from architectures and tools. Methods are frequently interlinked with architectures and tools on and with which they are implemented.

Tools

Simulation tools at a high level of abstraction are prerequisite for early feedback on design decisions during hardware / software system design. Qualitative evaluations are necessary for both performance related system characteristics (data throughput, transaction latency, operation frequency) as well as for energy consumption and robustness or reliability perspectives. The rapid assessment of different architecture alternatives enables MPSoC developers to cover a significantly larger design space than time and resource intensive realizations at lower levels of abstraction.