Application Domains For Software Transformations In Philips Semiconductors

Time: 11:45

Room: BBL 471

Speaker: Eric Kamps (Philips)

Title: Application domains for software transformations in Philips Semiconductors (Slides in pdf)

Abstract

This talk gives a brief overview of a number of application domains in Philips Research that are related to software transformations.

• Trimedia compiler system. Trimedia is a VLIW processor for multi-media applications. The processor, toolchain and challenges will be discussed.
• System level design. This area is on the boundary of hardware and software design. functional features can be either mapped on hardware resources like dedicated co-processors or software resources like general purpose processors.
• In a multi-threaded system, verifying thread-safety by testing is very difficult. The fault conditions are often corner cases and faults are non-deterministic due to scheduling of the threads. Furthermore, software is decomposed in terms of functions instead of threads and testing is only possible in the integration phase of the complete system. Therefore a static analysis approach would have huge benefits over testing.
• Diversity Management and timeline variability of large software systems. An component-based software engineering approach is used to enhance the flexibility and maintainability of systems. The approach can potentially be used to reduce software development costs, assemble systems rapidly and reduce the spiraling maintenance burden associated with the support and upgrad of large systems.

Eric Kamps is a senior engineer at the synthesis department of Philips Electronic Design and Tools (ED&T). ED&T is a self-financing activity within Philips Research. Philips ED&T is dedicated to the development and exploitation of innovative methods and tools for the design and test of Systems on Chip realized in the most advanced IC-technologies. ED&T's four departments cover the major issues of simulation, synthesis, verification and test. These departments serve a specific need of Philips in the design and manufacture of VDSM IC's. Nevertheless, the final role of ED&T is to transfer the solutions to external EDA vendors in an evolving stream of developments.