System-Level Design Languages:
Orthogonalizing the Issues

Thursday, March 9, 2000 - 8:30 - 10:00

Presenter: Edward A. Lee - UC Berkeley, USA

Abstract:

System-level design languages (SLDLs) need to be equally comfortable with hardware, software, and problem-level models. The requirements are too broad to be adequately addressed by any single solution that we would recognize as a "language." But the prospect of needing (or continuing to need) to use multiple incompatible languages to achieve a single system design is grim. In this talk, I outline an approach to achieving interoperability without a single monolithic standard language. Instead, orthogonal properties of a language are created and standardized separately. Specifically, an SLDL is divided into an abstract syntax, a system of syntactic transformations, a concrete syntax, an actor semantics, a semantics for the interaction of actors, and a type system. Each of these are roughly independent dimensions of a language, and two languages, tools, or frameworks may share identical designs in one or more dimensions. Interoperability can be achieved where practical, but does not become a straightjacket where impractical.

Biography:

Edward A. Lee is a Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at U.C. Berkeley. His research interests center on design, modeling, and simulation of embedded, real-time computational systems. He is director of the Ptolemy project at UC Berkeley. He is co-author of four books, numerous papers, and two patents. His bachelors degree (B.S.) is from Yale University (1979), his masters (S.M.) from MIT (1981), and his Ph.D. from U. C. Berkeley (1986). From 1979 to 1982 he was a member of technical staff at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey, in the Advanced Data Communications Laboratory. He is a co-founder of BDTI, Inc., where he is currently a Senior Technical Advisor, and has consulted for a number of other companies. He is a fellow of the IEEE, was an NSF Presidential Young Investigator, and won the 1997 Frederick Emmons Terman Award for Engineering Education.