A scientific study of the problems of digital
engineering for space flight systems,
with a view to their practical solution.
2001 MAPLD International Conference
Kossiakoff Conference Center
The Johns Hopkins University - Applied Physics Laboratory
11100 Johns Hopkins Road
Laurel, Maryland 20723-6099
September 11-13, 2001
Developing a complete System-on-Chip (SoC) with a CPU core and perhaps a dozen virtual components by a fixed deadline is no easy task. Designers may encounter business and legal problems in obtaining the virtual components and may find that information is missing. By first developing a platform containing these components, designers can overcome all of these uncertainties without risking the delay of a product. Once the platform is fully operational, derivative designs in which only a few virtual components are added or dropped can be accomplished rapidly. Xilinx, Triscend and Atmel have integrated CPU cores onto their chips and now offer platform SoCs that are programmable. The issues involved in adopting this approach will be discussed.
Dr. Don Bouldin has been a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville for 26 years. He received his degrees from Vanderbilt University and Georgia Tech. During 1995-96, Prof. Bouldin served as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on VLSI Systems. For more than a dozen years, he has served as special Section Editor of the "VLSI Designer's Interface" column for IEEE Circuits & Devices Magazine. Dr. Bouldin has authored over 180 publications and been the Principal Investigator for nearly eight million dollars of sponsored research, primarily with DARPA, NSF and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. In 1997, Dr. Bouldin was recognized as a Fellow of the IEEE for contributions to the design of special-purpose architectures using VLSI processors.
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