HW/SW Design Space Exploration on the Production Cell Setup

Abstract

This paper describes and compares five CSP based and two CSP related process-oriented motion control system implementations that are made for our Production Cell demonstration setup. Five implementations are software-based and two are FPGA hardware-based. All implementations were originally made with different purposes and investigating different areas of the design space for embedded control software resulting in an interesting comparison between approaches, tools and software and hardware implementations. Common for all implementations is the usage of a model-driven design method, a communicating process structure, the combination of discrete event and continuous time and that real-time behaviour is essential. This paper shows that many small decisions made during the design of all these embedded control software implementations influence our route through the design space for the same setup, resulting in seven different solutions with different key properties. None of the implementations is perfect, but they give us valuable information for future improvements of our design methods and tools.