Development Status: Beta

Current Version: 1.1

Environment: Unix flavors

Intended Audience: Embedded/Integrated System Designers

License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

Natural Language: English

Operating System: Linux, Solaris

Programming Language: C, C++

Topics: Co-design, Functional System Simulation, Cycle Accurate System Simulation, High Level Synthesis, Micro Kernel

Contact: disydent@asim.lip6.fr

Digital system design environment (Disydent) is an open framework for the co-design of embedded systems.

embedded system

In our terminology, we use the term application to denote the embedded system, because what makes the difference between a classical computer system and an embedded system is that the latter is tuned to a given application or at least a fairly small application area.

The behavior of embedded application is functionnally described as a set of processes exchanging data. The actual implementation of the application is physically realized on an embedded hardware, also called platform. The embedded hardware is made of:

1 or several general purpose processors (called processor or CPU),

1 or several processors dedicated to a special task (called co-processor or hardware accelerator),

memories to store software and data of the application,

1 or several on-chip interconnects to connect the processors, co-processors and memories.

co-design

This means that processes of the functionnal description of the application can run either as software on a processor or as hardware on a dedicated co-processor of the platform,

Designing an embedded application starts with a high level description of the application. This description of the behavior is either a report in natural language or a program in an executable sequential language. There are also non-functional specifications, usually given as constraints:

• cost constraint (area of target hardware),
• time constraint (maximum durations that the system must spent to perform treaments),
• power consumption constraint (duration when operated on batteries).

The Disydent tools help to go from the high level description to the actual embedded application implementation verifying the constraints. These tools induces a specific type of design methodology. The Disydent approach is top-bottom and based on simulation.

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