The high-level objective of the ODETTE project is to support the competitiveness of the European communication and information processing industry by reducing the entire design time and cost of digital embedded HW/SW systems. The prime deliverable of the ODETTE project is a system for object-oriented HW/SW co-design, which provides a migration path from object-oriented system specifications to efficient HW and SW implementations. This method differs from existing co-design methodologies in its seamless synthesis and optimisation of the HW design directly from object-oriented specifications, and its generation of the SW code. Through object-orientated synthesis, it is possible to develop an early prototype, where the object-orientation characteristics support reuse of SW and HW components.

 

ODETTE will aim at avoiding the paradigmatic breaks between system specification, SW development and HW design. By applying a holistic, consistent, and automated design methodology to the entire system on a chip design and functional design verification, an efficient design exploration and optimisation process will be enabled. In other words, the same analysis, modelling, and structuring paradigms will be used for the entire system, regardless of whether the implementation will be made in software or hardware.

 

In order to achieve this objective in a sustainable way, the following sub-goals will be pursued in the project:

 

• Build and demonstrate a complete working design flow from system specification to the logic synthesis level, with significant gains in design time and efficiency, and with minimal overhead in terms of area.

• Support design and architecture reuse, through a consistent object-oriented design methodology supported by appropriate encapsulation and derivation mechanisms of the design modelling languages.

• Interface to industry standard design flows.

• Implement the design methodology in an efficient tool set, where not available commercially.

• Provide a tool package for further dissemination and external exploitation.

• Evaluate and quantify the results of the project.

• Develop and market a complete co-design solution including HW/SW co-simulation and synthesis tools, using as input object-oriented description languages for both HW and SW designs.

• Augment the European CAD product offerings with innovative software in the rapidly increasing market of co-design tools.