The Metropolis Research Group

• Luciano Lavagno
• Claudio Passerone
• Vishal Shah

Today, the design chain lacks adequate support, with most system-level designers using a collection of unlinked tools. The implementation then proceeds with informal techniques involving numerous human-language interactions that create unnecessary and unwanted iterations among groups of designers in different companies or different divisions.

The move toward programmable platforms shifts the design implementation task toward embedded software design. When embedded software reaches the complexity typical of today's designs, the risk that the software will not function correctly increases exponentially. The Metropolis project seeks to develop a unified framework that can cope with this challenge.

The Microelectronics group of Politecnico di Torino is cooperating with the University of California at Berkeley and Cadence Berkeley Labs on this project.

Metropolis consists of an infrastructure, a tool set, and design methodologies for various application domains. The infrastructure provides a mechanism such that

1. heterogeneous components of a system can be represented uniformly, and
2. tools for formal methods can be applied naturally.

Our group works specifically on the co-simulation tools for Metropolis, aiming at a modeling mechanism that allows one to separate concerns between:

• functionality and algorithmic aspects
• communication between functional blocks
• architecture of the implementation platform
• non-functional constraints restricting the set of legal behaviors (e.g. timing, power, ...)

The Metropolis project is described in a number of publications, among which we recommend reading:

• Felice Balarin, Harry Hsieh, Luciano Lavagno, Claudio Passerone, Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, Yosinori Watanabe. Metropolis: An Integrated Environment for Electronic System Design IEEE Computer, April 2003 (Vol. 36, No. 4)

Marcello Chiaberge <marcello@polimage.polito.it>	Last Updated: 19/04/2003	Microelectronics Group Page