Methods for the design automation of flexible communication systems

Abstract

In this thesis, a new design methodology based upon a formal model is proposed, which will provide a solution to the system-level architecture exploration of flexible communication systems. The goal of this work is to find new means that enable finding a trade-off between providing adaptive and fixed hardware. The idea is to specify the systems through a graph based, computer readable formal model, the Reconfigurable Hybrid Data Flow Graph (HDFG+R), and perform architecture explorations via behavior preserving graph transformations. By following the proposed design methodology, designers are able to generate reconfigurable or adaptive architectures from so called switchable architectures, which are built by simply stacking all required standard and function implementations. One main challenge here is to identify mergeable resources from different stacked subsystems and automatically combine them together to build possible reconfigurable architectures. An HDFG+R based technique is therefore developed, which enables automatic identification of mergeable resources from switchable multi-standard and multi-function systems. A practical use of the methods developed within this thesis is illustrated by means of a multi-standard Zigbee transmitter system in the end of the thesis.