Section: New Results

A model-based approach for dynamically reconfigurable systems design: from MARTE to RecoMARTE

This work is done in the context of the ANR FAMOUS project. It proposes a co-design methodology of dynamically reconfigurable systems based on FPGA. Our methodology is based on the Engineering Model Driven approach (MDE) and the models specification is done in the UML MARTE profile. It aims at ensuring flexibility, reusability and automation to facilitate the work of the designer and improve his productivity. The first contribution related is identifying parts of dynamically reconfigurable FPGA that can be modeled at the high abstraction levels. So, we defined a design flow based on the MDE to ensure the automation of code generation. According to this flow, several models are created mainly through MARTE profile concepts.

However, the modeling concepts of dynamic reconfiguration on FPGAs required extensions in MARTE. Thus, we identified the missing concepts to be integrated in a new profile that extends MARTE called RECOMARTE. The second contribution allows the chain automation and experimental validation. To integrate our design flow and to automate code generation, a processing chain was used. The final model resulting from MARTE proposed design flow is given as input to this chain.

We thereby move from MARTE to RECOMARTE models via an intermediate description according to the IP-XACT standard to finally generate files describing the complete system in the Xilinx XPS environment. This automation will accelerate the design phase and avoid errors due to the direct manipulation of these details. Finally, an example of application of image processing has been developed to demonstrate and validate our methodology.