Message from the Symposium Chairs

Abstract

This meeting marks the tenth anniversary of the forum that traces its roots to the first Hardware/Software Codesign Workshop held in Estes Park in fall 1992. A retrospective over a decade of the meeting reveals a strong and vibrant community of researchers that took the very first bold steps into uncharted territory. With researchers coming together from such diverse backgrounds as logic design, artificial intelligence and software engineering, the convergence was also as much marked by technical challenges as by the cultural understanding of what goes on the other side. The yin-and-yang of hardware and software gyrated around technical issues such as system modeling, system partitioning and synthesis. Through discussions the community cross pollination was especially remarkable, with software community coming to appreciate that "software synthesis" has little to do with erstwhile automatic program generation but optimization of software from formal models and specifications much the same way logic synthesis results in optimized logic netlists. That software can be optimized (against multiple competing criteria) much as hardware is routinely optimized by EDA tools was as much a revelation as the understanding that hardware/software codesign is really about systems engineering rather than application of a chain of automatic computer-aided design tools. Indeed, the discussions brought up similarities and lessons learnt in complex system designs from submarines to the Space Shuttle. This community was still shy of using the term "Embedded Systems," for in those days embedded systems often referred to microcontroller-based systems marked by low criticality, low performance and cost sensitive designs. Over a decade, however, as mainstream computing has increasingly become a part of our daily lives -and indeed often incorporates components and technologies that are on the cutting edge of performance and functionality achievable today -that reticence has been abandoned. Embedded systems, particularly those for microelectronic on-chip implementations, have come to characterize a major component of the meeting. CODES sessions in recent years have addressed issues such as architectural design, design space exploration and validation of such systems. Energy efficiency and performance modeling (including real-time performance) have become major research themes.