This is a BALBOA tree
The Balboa Project
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Description

The goal of the Balboa project is to investigate the usage of high level methodologies, languages and CAD tools for system-on-chip architectural modeling. The research is divided into three sub-projects.

Structured system composition

This part is the core Balboa component integration environment, which is used to build system models with IP libraries. The environment implements split-programming concepts combined with component-based design development, in a loosely typed integration environment. System models are assembled from C++ libraries. The scripting layer implements Tcl and OTcl extensions in a Component Integration Language (CIL). We refer to the C++ IP blocks as components (as a unit of reuse). Components can use a simulation library, SystemC in some examples and the Balboa simulation library in others to model concurrency. A customized Interface Definition Language named BIDL is used to export C++ components to the Balboa environment. The environment run-time infrastructure is aware of object models of components and uses object-oriented mechanism to compose architectures. A type system keeps the coherency between the interpreted and the compiled layer and perform type inference. In the long term, we investigate how we can rely on the type system to infer architectures.

Concurrency exploitation and simulation efficiency

This work investigates simulation efficiency using different threading mechanisms at the specification level. It also research implications of threaded kernel into the specification language. Techniques predict simulation efficiency from concurrency and target platform analysis in order to reassign concurrency to enhance efficiency. More information about this work can be found here.

Design composition vizualisation and visual formalisms

This work investigate visual formalisms for architecture specification and composition. It also relies on type-instance views to help the designer in abstracting architectural details. Although many notations are investigated, a GUI front end implementing an interactive structural specification tool with extended subsets of UML with block diagram-style notations, is currently being implemented.

Publications

Conferences and Workshops

[pdf] F. Doucet, S. Shukla, M. Otsuka and R. Gupta
Balboa: A Component-Based Design Environment for System Models
In IEEE Transaction on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems, Dec. '03
[pdf] J.-P. Talpin, P. Le Guernic, S. K. Shukla, R. Gupta and F. Doucet
Polychrony for formal refinement-checking in a system-level design methodology
In Proc of Application of Concurrency to System Design, 2003
[pdf] J.-P. Talpin, P. Le Guernic, S. K. Shukla, R. Gupta and F. Doucet
A polychronous model for high-level component-based system design
In Proc. Design Automation and Test in Europe, 2003
[pdf] J.-P. Talpin, P. Le Guernic, S. K. Shukla, R. Gupta and F. Doucet
A polychronous model for high-level component-based system design
In Proc. Design Automation and Test in Europe, 2003
[pdf] F. Doucet, S. Shukla, and R. Gupta,
Introspection in System-Level Language Frameworks: Meta-level vs. Integrated
In Proc. Design Automation and Test in Europe, 2003
[pdf] F. Doucet, S. Shukla, and R. Gupta,
Typing Abstractions and Management in a Component Framework,
In Proc. of Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference, 2003
[pdf] S. Shukla, F. Doucet and R. Gupta,
Structured Composition Techniques for Embedded Systems,
In Proc. of International Conference on High Performance Computing, 2002
[pdf] F. Doucet, M. Otsuka, S. Shukla, and R. Gupta,
An Environment for Dynamic Component Composition for Efficient Co-Design,
In Proc. Design Automation and Test in Europe, 2002
[pdf] F. Doucet, R. Gupta, M. Otsuka, P. Schaumont and S. Shukla,
Interoperability as a Design Issue in C++ Based Modeling Environment,
In Proc. International Symposium on System Synthesis, 2001
[pdf] F. Doucet, V. Sinha and R. Gupta,
Structural Design Composition for C++ Hardware Models,
In Proc. Computer Society VLSI Workshop, 2001
[pdf] P. Garg, S. Shukla and R. K. Gupta,
Efficient Usage of Concurrency Models in an Object-Oriented Co-design Framework,
In Proc. Design Automation and Test in Europe 2001
[pdf] V. Sinha, F. Doucet, C. Siska, R. K. Gupta, S. Liao and A. Ghosh,
YAML: A Tool for Design Visualization and Capture,
In Proc. International Symposium on System Synthesis, 2000
[pdf] F. Doucet, V. Sinha and R. K. Gupta,
Microelectronic System-on-Chip Modeling using Objects and their Relationships,
OSEE 2000

Technical Reports

[pdf] F. Doucet, M. Otsuka, R. Gupta and S. Shukla,
Efficient System Level Co-Design Environment using Split Level Programming,
Technical Report 01-34, CECS/UCI, July 2001
[pdf] V. Sinha and R. K. Gupta,
Design Visualization and Entry using Structural and Functional Entities,
Technical Report 00-05, CECS/UCI, Feb. 2000
[n/a] F. Doucet, S. Kim and R Jerjurikar,
Oriented Design Translations: ICSP/SystemC to RTL VHDL,
Technical Report 00-50, CECS/UCI, Apr. 2000
[pdf] F. Doucet and R. K. Gupta,
Debugging of Polymorphic SystemC/C++ Code for Hardware Design,
Technical Report 00-06, CECS/UCI, Feb. 2000
[pdf] F. Doucet, V. Sinha, C. Siska and R. K. Gupta,
System-on-Chip Modeling using Objects and their Relationships,
Technical Report 99-53, CECS/UCI, Nov. 1999

Members

Faculty Graduate Students Industry Associates
Prof. Rajesh Gupta
Dr. Sandeep Shukla 		Frederic Doucet Masato Otsuka, Fujitsu
Mohamed Ben Romdhane, Conexant

Software

The Balboa software is currently being re-implemented. We will post new version of Balboa environment, OS simulator and protocol description analyzer tools. For the old version of the software please download it from the old Balboa UCI page but *beware* it does not compile with the recent GCC version (3.x) found in Linux Redhat 9/Fedora Core 1.

Links

The Balboa project is supported by the National Science Foundation, Synopsys, FCAR and SRC
Frederic Doucet
Last modified: Fri Feb 20 16:37:59 PST 2004