HaSoCo: Hardware/ Software CoDesign im Automotive-Umfeld

Motivation

FPGAs are now firmly established in the industry and new application areas are being developed all the time. Nevertheless, a trend can be observed that circuit manufacturers are increasingly investing in infrastructure for modeling and simulation, as the devices can no longer be utilized to capacity due to their complexity. For this reason, the programming of complex devices will have to be carried out at a much higher level of abstraction in the future than is currently the case. As a result, the manufacturers of the necessary infrastructure are coming under increasing pressure to offer operators solutions that are as cost-effective as possible and, above all, can be used effectively. From a technological point of view, the concept of so-called model-based hardware-software co-design (HW/SW co-design) is still in its infancy, but improvements are being introduced all the time, although they are not optimized for all use cases.

Challenge

The currently available tools are either based on properitären solutions of the circuit manufacturers (ALTERA C2H, XILINX System Simulator, etc.) or on generally valid concepts e.g. of Matlab/Simulink. The method of model-based design allows the development of a system on a high abstraction level as well as its automatic compilation into an efficient FPGA implementation. In addition, hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) capabilities of device manufacturers' system generators can be used to co-simulate FPGA implementations directly in Simulink. The use of Matlab/Simulink for FPGA programming represents a noteworthy approach in the automotive environment. However, concepts and implementations are still in the early stages of application implementation.

Research activities

 Model-based HW/SW co-design for the specific application field "automotive".

In particular, the use of Matlab/Simulink for:

• ALTERA
• XILINX
• Formal Specifications under UML
• New trends in concurrent programming languages (C) for programming FPGAs and processors.