COMS W4995-02 Languages for Embedded System Design


	COMS W4995-02 Languages for Embedded System Design Fall 2002

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General Information

Class meets on Mondays and Wednesdays, 4:10pm-5:25pm, in Room 545 of the Seeley W. Mudd Building

Overview

Embedded systems are single-purpose computers that are often part of larger systems such as cars or telephones. Their design requires tight integration of application-specific hardware and software, and often have strong constraints on power, cost, and speed. While most embedded systems are currently designed using ad hoc techniques, the complexity of future systems will demand formal design techniques.

The course is an introduction to a wide variety of languages used to specify embedded systems. Embodied in these languages are different models of computation, such as sequential, dataflow, discrete-event, and synchronous, that shape how design problems may be solved. Knowing about more of these languages will give you a bigger bag of tricks for solving design problems.

When you have completed the course, you will have gained some experience using each of the languages, will have learned about how each of them are implemented, and will have completed a project that will give you more in-depth knowledge of one of the languages, either by using it to design a system or by creating an analysis tool for the language.

Prerequisites

COMS W4115 Programming Languages and Translators or equivalent
COMS W3823 Digital Logic or equivalent

This is a course about both hardware and software languages, so I expect you to be familar with programming in a language such as C or Java, be aware of language and compiler design issues and also be somewhat familiar with digital logic design. A simple litmus test: you should be able to write a program that performs a depth-first traversal of a graph, know what an abstract syntax tree is, and should be able to design a four-bit binary counter using NAND gates and flip-flops.

Required Text

Cover of
Languages for Digital Embedded Systems

Stephen A. Edwards.
Languages for Digital Embedded Systems.
Kluwer, 2000.
ISBN 0-7923-7925-X

Near Columbia, this is available at Papyrus Booksellers, at the corner of 114th and Broadway. Textbooks are downstairs.

Schedule

Date	Lecture	Reading	Assignment	Due
September 4	Introduction	Ch. 1
September 9	Assembly Languages	Ch. 6	HW 1
September 11	The C Language	Ch. 7
September 16	The C++ Language	Ch. 8
September 18			HW 2	HW 1
September 23	Software Concurrency
September 25	Java 1	Ch. 9		Project Proposals
September 30	Java 2
October 2	RTOS 1	Ch. 10		HW 2
October 7	(class canceled)
October 9			Midterm 1
October 14	Esterel 1	Ch. 13
October 16	GL: Al Aho on Awk
October 21	Writing Scholarly Papers
October 23	Esterel 2
October 28	Esterel Programming		HW 3
October 30	Literature Presentations			Literature Survey
November 4	Election Day Holiday
November 6	Dataflow 1	Ch. 11, 12
November 11	Dataflow 2
November 13	Review of Digital Logic	Ch. 2
November 18	Verilog 1	Ch. 3	HW 4	HW 3
November 20	Verilog 2
November 25	(class canceled)
November 27	(class canceled)
December 2	System C 1	Ch. 16
December 4	System C 2			HW 4
December 9			In-class Final
December 16	Final project presentations 4:10-7PM. Project Due.

Deliverables

Two tests, one covering the first half of the class, one covering the second. There will be no comprehensive final.
Five homework assignments, each generally due two weeks after it is assigned.
A one-paragraph project proposal.
A one-page literature survey reviewing your project area.
A five-minute presentation on the literature survey.
A six-page project writeup.
A ten-minute presentation on the project.

Class policies

Grading

50 % Project
15 % Midterm 1
15 % Final
20 % Homework

Collaboration

You are permitted to collaborate on homeworks, however, the homework you submit must be your own unique creation, and you must understand and be able to explain your result. My intention is not to reduce your workload, but to give you the opportunity to learn from your peers. See Columbia academic policies for more details.

Collaboration on the project is mandatory unless your "team" is just you.

Collaboration on the midterms is forbidden.

Late Policy

Zero credit for anything handed in after the due date without explicit approval of the instructor. Homeworks are due at the beginning of class on the designated due date.

Useful Links

A sample LaTeX file, a BibTeX file, a Makefile, and the PDF file they all produce, illustrating how to write a paper in LaTeX. You may use this as a template for the literature survey and final project report. Its content is also representative of what I am looking for in a final report.

COMS W4995-02 from 2001

A small annotated bibliography on embedded systems.

EE382C-9

Prof. Brian Evans at the University of Texas at Austin teaches a similar course that focuses more on signal processing issues.

290N

Prof. Edward A. Lee at the University of California, Berkeley taught a much more theoretical class on languages and models of computation.

ee249

Prof. Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli at the University of California, Berkeley taught a similar class.

Kees Vissers and Pieter van der Wolf, Kahn Process Networks and system level design. A presentation that describes the use of Kahn Process networks in the design of an MPEG decoder.

Gilles Kahn. The Semantics of a Simple Language for Parallel Programming. Information Processing 74: Proceedings of IFIP Congress. Stockholm, Sweden. p. 471-475. 1974.

Updated Mon Dec 16 14:20:10 EST 2002