Co-organized by ISNE and CHiPES:

Dr. Vincent Mooney, Deputy Director of Institute for Substainable Nano-Electronics (ISNE) and
Visiting Assoc. Prof. in the School of EEE
Dr. Srikanthan Thambipillai, Director of the Centre for High Performance Embedded Systems (CHiPES) and
Prof. in the School of SCE

Speaker:
Dr. Peter Marwedel received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Kiel (Germany) in 1974. He worked at the CS Department of that University from 1974 until 1989. He is a pioneer and co-inventor of behavioural synthesis and worked on the MIMOLA synthesis and code generation tools (a landmark in this area) until 1986. In 1987, he received the Dr. habil. degree (a degree required for tenure track positions in Germany) for this work.

Since 1989 he is a Full Professor and Chair for Embedded Systems at the CS Department of Technische Universität (TU) Dortmund (Germany). He served as the Dean of that Department between 1992 and 1995. The focus of the group led by Dr. Marwedel is on code generation techniques for embedded systems. The efficiency of embedded software, in particular energy efficiency, is a key objective.

In 2003, Dr. Marwedel published a well-known text book on embedded system design. In the same year, he received the teaching award of his University. He is a member of the ARTIST European network of excellence on real-time and embedded systems and an affiliated member of the Hipeac European network of excellence on high performance embedded systems. He contributes to the education of students in the Embedded System Design programs at ALARI, Lugano (Switzerland). Also, he organized an internship program for students of Indian Institutes of Technology at TU Dortmund. For a number of years, he was the representative of the DATE conference at ASP-DAC.

In his work, Dr. Marwedel has bridged the gap between academic research and industrial exploitation. He is also heading (as a CEO) the local technology transfer centre ICD e.V. ICD is in charge of transforming research results into industrial products. ICD has designed several embedded system design tools for industrial customers.’’

Abstract:
Embedded systems need to be efficient. Energy efficiency is currently a key objective, due to the limited availability of electrical energy for most embedded systems. Meeting real-time constraints without over-dimensioning systems is an objective becoming increasingly important due to the tight integration of embedded systems with (sometimes safety-critical) real-time systems. This talk will present an overview of the work of embedded systems researchers at Dortmund led by Dr. Marwedel within on-going European projects addressing these objectives. All tools are based on the ICD-C compiler development infrastructure from ICD (a spin-off of TU Dortmund, see www.icd.de/es).

The first project is the PREDATOR (www.predator-project.eu) project aiming at the design of timing-predictable systems. Within the project, TU Dortmund focuses on the reconciliation of compilers with timing modeling. The worst case execution time (WCET) aware compiler WCC demonstrates techniques for integrating explicit timing models into compilers. WCC uses the worst case execution time analysis tool aiT from AbsInt for WCET modeling. Its integration into WCC enables WCET-oriented optimizations. The talk will present the integration technique and a number of optimizations together with their results.

The second project is the MNEMEE-project (www.mnemee.org), for which ICD is a project partner. Mnemee aims at exploiting information about the memory architecture (for example, about scratch pad memories) for optimizing software for that architecture. The Mnemee tool flow is based on a number of source-to-source program transformations. Source-to-source transformations allow the optimizations to be used with compilers for a variety of target processors. Key features of Dortmund’s contributions to the tool flow will be explained.
The talk will also briefly mention the ArtistDesign network of excellence. This network (see ) provides good links between the researchers at Dortmund and the larger embedded systems community. Also the concept of embedded systems education underlying the presenter’s Springer textbook will be briefly touched upon.