EDA Tech Forum

On the eve of this month’s DATE conference, we took a snapshot of the continent’s and the conference’s priorities with general chair Donatella Sciuto.

This year’s general chair of Design Automation and Test in Europe is Donatella Sciuto, a full professor at the Politecnico d iMilano in Milan, Italy. She received her Laurea in Electronic Engineering from the Politecnico di Milano in 1984 and her PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 1988 from the University of Colorado, Boulder. She also holds an MBA from the Scuola di Direzione Aziendale, Bocconi University. Her research interests include embedded systems design methodologies and architectures.

We spoke to Prof. Sciuto shortly after the DATE 2008 program was finalized. This is an extended version of this interview that originally appeared in EDA Tech Forum journal.

EDA Tech Forum: Your research covers areas such as embedded systems methodologies, hardware-software co-design and the shift to multi-processor systems-on-chip (MPSoCs), so let’s start there. How would you sketch that landscape, particularly given that DATE is dedicating a day to ‘dependable’ embedded systems?

Prof. Sciuto: We are now in the programmable platforms era. Some of the main problems facing EDA lie in finding the tools to build these platforms and in creating the software environments from which to program them. These problems are becoming increasingly relevant with the advent of ‘many-core multi-processors’. And these chips exist today – for example, the Cisco Systems Metrochip has 192 processing elements.

Meanwhile, applications and platforms are undergoing this merger of general computing, wireless connectivity and consumer electronics. That again increases the complexity of managing the design and programming tasks.

Our successes today have been only partial, dealing with single aspects of a growing problem and concentrating mostly on the development of programmable platforms. Major issues remain with the software-programming environment and in finding how to most effectively exploit these platforms.

In that context, there has been ongoing research on dependability for many years but its scope has been limited to specific mission-critical applications. The problem is that you need to be able to develop flexible, reconfigurable platforms, which feature that dependability. And you must be able to manage them. One of the goals for such platforms is to increase their lifetimes, even in the presence of changing requirements and additional features, to reduce development costs.