TITEL

Wings – predicting timing performance of wafer scanners

SPREKER

Jeroen Voeten, researchfellow, Esi, en UHD, TUE

ABSTRACT

Embedded control is a key product technology differentiator for many of the Dutch high-tech industries. The strong increase in complexity of embedded control systems combined with the occurrence of late changes in control requirements, results in many timing performance problems showing up only during the integration phase. This results in extremely costly design iterations, severely threatening the time-to-market and time-to-quality constraints.

In the Wings project this integration problem is attacked systematically through the (largely automated) construction of executable models. The key approach is to separate the logic of the embedded control application from the execution platform on which it is deployed. The resulting models yield a high-level overview and provide system-wide insight in timing bottlenecks. They further allow rapid exploration of alternatives for optimization of timing performance (by adapting the application, the execution platform or the mapping).

The Wings project has demonstrated the effectiveness of the performance prediction and optimization method by applying it to a complex performance-critical subsystem of a wafer scanner. The application of the method has resulted in more than a dozen improvement proposals yielding a huge overall timing performance gain and in a development roadmap of the execution platform.

BIO

Jeroen Voeten received his master’s degree in Mathematics and Computing Science in 1991 and his PhD in Electrical Engineering in 1997 from the Eindhoven University of Technology. He is a senior research fellow at the Embedded Systems Institute in Eindhoven and an associate professor in the Electronic Systems group at the Eindhoven faculty of Electrical Engineering. His research interests include system-level design methodology and performance modeling for embedded systems.

TAAL

Nederlands/Engels