| The design complexity of embedded systems increases as more processors and subsystems are integrated on one chip. In order to overcome the design bottlenecks and shorten the time to market, system engineers are motivated to design from a higher abstraction level, namely Electronic System Level (ESL). ESL design methodology has emerged to address the design complexity by supporting HW/SW co-specification and co-simulation, system design space exploration and high-level synthesis.;ESL design relies on an input ESL model, namely the specification model. Creating parallel and safe specification models efficiently is a prerequisite for building cost-effective embedded systems in ESL design. Practically, application reference code is reused to create the ESL models. However, the reference models lack the necessary characteristics, such as explicit parallelism, structural hierarchy and synthesizability, for ESL design. It is a time-consuming and error-prone process to manually recode the reference models into the desired ESL models.;This dissertation addresses the automation gap of recoding. We follow the designer-in-the-loop recoding methodology which efficiently combines the automation tools with designer's knowledge. Our approach aims to expose parallelism in the ESL model and guarantees that the parallel model is safe from race conditions.;First, we identify the essential steps in recoding and define a recoding design flow to create parallel and safe ESL models. Second, we contribute three automated recoding operations: variable dependency analysis to provide prompt analysis during model development, race condition analysis to assist verifying and debugging the parallelism and a high-level transformation function to instantly create loop-level parallelism. Third, we develop a recoding development platform based on Eclipse to integrate recoding tools and facilitate the designer-in-the-loop approach.;The effectiveness of the recoding functions is shown with experiments on a set of embedded applications. Also, an classroom experiment with 68 graduate students shows our recoding approach using the Eclipse-based recoding platform increases the productivity and reduces errors in parallel ESL model development. |
