Communication Channel Synthesis for Heterogeneous Embedded Systems

Embedded systems have become part of our daily live. They are the backbone for applications such as dishwashers, set top boxes, and patient monitoring systems. During their development phase the heterogeneity and connectivity of the system components is a big challenge as their interplay provides the system behavior. The communication between interacting parts is a performance critical issue and affects features such as execution speed, power consumption, and costs. Usually, several potential implementation solutions have to be elaborated that distinguish in features such as latency, cost, and especially by a different communication infrastructure. Nevertheless, only few methodologies have emerged that support an efficient assessment and implementation of alternative implementations considering the communication features of the system components.

Two issues are still open:
- There exists a lot of models to describe the implementation of an embedded system. Nevertheless, the heterogeneity of the system components prevented a consistent model (for processors, reconfigurable hardware devices, and memories) that considers their communication features as well. During development a behavior description is refined and mapped onto an implementation description. There exists no methodology well as the reconfiguration features of system components.
- The subject of this research work is on models, methodologies, and implementation techniques to efficiently establish a communication infrastructure within an heterogeneous embedded system.