ACTORS

Objectives

The objectives of the project are:

• To develop a design flow and relative profiling and synthesis tool for embedded systems development with the following innovative characteristics:

• Higher level of abstraction from the specification stage to the SW and HW synthesis stages
• Systematic methodologies and tools for developing rich and expressive “data flow” models (based on CAL actor language and hierarchical networks of CAL actors) starting from standard imperative specifications
• High level design space exploration without or with platform constraints expressed by complex metrics
• Direct synthesis of SW and HW components from the high level “data flow” models

• To refine and validate the new design environment for complex and challenging applications in control, signal processing, and media streaming and processing. A specific attention will be devoted to the automatic generation (under high level designer constraints) of efficient code from the data flow model of CAL actors.
• To develop new theory and methods for reservation and feedback-based resource scheduling for software-intensive large volume embedded systems to be used both as high level constraints in the design flow before automatic code generation and as a run-time mechanism providing on-line adaptation to changing resource requirements.
• To develop and implement the framework elements necessary for managing adaptivity and dynamic reconfiguration of CAL actor dataflow models using the reservation-based scheduling metrics.