Specification and design methodology has seen significant growth as a research area over the last decade, tracking but lagging behind VLSI design technology in general and the CAD industry in particular. The commercial rush to market tries to leverage existing technology which fuels CAD design tool development. Paralleling this is very active basic and applied research to investigate and move forward rational and effective methodologies for accomplishing digital design, especially in the field of hardware/software codesign. It is this close relationship between industry and academia that makes close cooperation between researchers and practitioners so important-and monographs like this that combine both abstract concept and pragmatic implementation deftly bridge this often gaping chasm. It was at the IEEE/ACM Eighth International Symposium on Hardware/Software Codesign where I met the author of this monograph, Dr. Randall Janka, who was presenting some of his recent dissertation research results on specification and design methodology, or as he has so succinctly defined this sometimes ambiguous concept, "the tools and rules." Where so many codesign researchers are trying to prove out different aspects of codesign and using toy applications to do so, Dr. Janka had developed a complete specification and design methodology and prototyped the infrastructure-and proven its viability, utility, and effectiveness using a demanding real-world application of a real-time synthetic aperture radar imaging processor that was implemented with embedded parallel processors.
The process of designing large real-time embedded signal processing systems is plagued by a lack of coherent specification and design methodology. A canonical waterfall design process is commonly used to specify, design, and implement these systems with commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) multiprocessing (MP) hardware and software. Powerful frameworks exist for each individual phase of this canonical design process, but no single methodology exists which enables these frameworks to work together coherently, that is, allowing the output of a framework used in one phase to be consumed by a different framework used in the next phase. This lack of coherence usually leads to design errors that are not caught until well into the implementation phase. The cost of redesign increases as the design moves through these three stages, thus, the methodology desccribed above can become costly if errors are not detected in the early stages of design. This text shows how designs targeting COTS MP technologies can be improved by providing a coherent coupling between these frameworks, a quality known as "model continuity".
This book presents a new specification and design methodology (SDM) which accomplishes the requirements specification, design exploration, and implementation of COTS MP-based signal processing systems by using powerful commercial frameworks that are intelligently integrated into a single domain-specific SDM.
