funded by EPSRC (GR/R32666) and EPSRC-via King's College London (GR/R32895) from 1st July 2001 for three years. Total amount of funding is approx. £340K pounds.
This is a collaborative research project between the Departments
of Computing Science and Electrical and Electronic
Engineering at Newcastle and
Department of Electronic Engineering at King's College London.
The aim of the project is to develop an overall hardware-oriented
architecture and design methodology for constructing (embedded)
real-time concurrent systems
Official webpage of COHERENT
COHERENT proposes to construct embedded real-time systems of medium complexity as on-chip systems (SoCs) with heterogeneous timing in order to improve timing and energy efficiency of systems for portable and miniature applications in control, robotics, image processing etc. The proposed concept of a hardware-oriented architecture for such systems, called a real-time network on a chip (RTNoC), will consist of computational units of maximum diversity (this issue lies outside the scope of the project) and communication components from (a finite set) of generic asynchronous communication mechanisms (ACMs), which is the focus of this project.
The project will deliver a design
methodology for RTNoC together with a parametrised library of ACM IP blocks
that will, in the longer term, allow the designer to map an
application-oriented specification of the system to its implementation with
maximum transparency and minimum loss of time and energy resources. It will
bridge the gap between the existing (e.g. MASCOT) ideas of building
distributed real-time systems and those of globally asynchronous locally
synchronous (GALS) for SoCs by investigating techniques for efficient
hardware implementation of the elements of communication and multitasking
support in the former, and providing a wide range of asynchrony levels, from
fully synchronous to wait-free and maximally non-blocking, for the latter.
This will enable the seamless composition of systems with time-driven and
data-driven parts.
This project builds on the previous experience obtained in
its predecessor:
COMFORT project
Further details about the project may be obtained from
Alex Yakovlev, Dept. of
Computing Science, University of Newcastle upon Tyne,
NE1 7RU, tel. +44-191-2228184, email:
Alex.Yakovlev@ncl.ac.uk