Welcome to SIM - Microelectronic System Design!

Due to the strongly increasing computing power and available memory size over the last decades, hardware platforms have a significant impact on the applications to be executed and became the driving force for innovation in important application domains, like automotive, mobile communication, industrial automation, and healthcare. The heterogeneous and multiprocessing nature of the underlying hardware architecture raises software implementation problems of significant complexity. An increasing number of applications rely on interconnected individual processing power combined with the networking of all information and communication technologies. For example, modern vehicles contain a network of interconnected electronic control units (ECUs) communicating via different busses using several protocols (e.g. CAN, MOST, FlexRay), and tomorrow's automotive networks will have to support highly safety-critical and reliable systems, like x-by-wire. Therefore, new system functionalities will be built less by isolated components and more by synergetic networking of components within a highly-interconnected system environment. Moreover, software and hardware become tightly coupled - which by the conventional approach of separated software and hardware development with late system integration is more and more error-prone and leads to a growing development time. The change in the aforementioned application domains requires a paradigm shift in designing electronic systems.

This paradigm shift has strongly influenced the research activities during the last years at the research group Microelectronic System Design (SIM). Main objective is to start embedded system design at a level, where the creative work is carried out and to capture all needed aspects of the involved hardware and software components as detailed as possible for early system evaluation and refinement. Based on this embedded system model, a seamless design flow from electronic system level (ESL) down to register transfer level (RTL) of abstraction has been developed in order to design the most appropriate system and network architecture with respect to performance, power and reliability constraints. Efficient ESL verification approaches using novel virtual prototyping techniques have been developed for verifying the functional system behaviour and non-functional properties. Virtual prototypes provide a fast and flexible execution platform for embedded software development very early in the design process. The developed methods and tools are successfully applied to extend the AUTOSAR development process for modelling, refinement and verification of AUTOSAR software components. The international development partnership AUTOSAR (AUTOmotive System ARchitecture) consists of numerous car manufacturers, suppliers and tool vendors.