A Case Study in Codesign of Distributed Systems -- Vehicle Parking Management System

Trong-Yen Lee
Pao-Ann Hsiung
Sao-Jie Chen
Department of Electrical Engineering
Institute of Information Science
Department of Electrical Engineering
National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan.
Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan.
National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan.

Abstract

Hardware-software codesign of distributed systems is a more challenging task than that of centralized embedded systems. Each phase of codesign, such as copartitioning, cosynthesis, cosimulation, and coverification, must take into account physical restrictions imposed by the distributed nature of such systems. Although codesign of distributed systems is more complex, yet many common parts of the systems can be reused for codesign. For the above two reasons, we have adopted an object-oriented (OO) codesign approach, which allows a natural structural restriction and object design reuse. A parallel approach to hardware-software partitioning is also presented. We illustrate our techniques through a case study on a Vehicle Parking Management System (VPMS). The study shows the benefits of OO codesign and parallel partitioning. Validation is accomplished through prototyping and emulation.

KEYWORDS:
object-oriented codesign, parallel copartitioning, emulation, distributed embedded systems, case-study.