DiplodocusDF: Analyzing Hardware/Software Interactions with a Dinosaur
Abstract
Development of new products commonly relies on existing designs where hardware
and software are modeled separately and their interactions investigated late at
verification time. Composing hardware with software yields more than the
sum of the two parts and solid design dedicates a great deal of time and money
to understand their interactions. This paper presents a novel modeling
methodology based on DiplodocusDF, a UML Model-Driven Engineering approach
for the design of heterogeneous data processing systems.
Our methodology separately models conflicting aspects such as communications
versus computations, dataflow versus controlflow and allows for their impact on
the overall system's performance to be separately analyzed at various
abstraction levels. Our methodology is applied to a case study which shows how
it is possible to study interactions parallel to design, thus
greatly reducing time-to-market of new products and comprehension of existing designs.