140 likes | 250 Views
A Design Metatool. Rong Chen Mentors: Roberto Passerone, BassamTabbara. Supervised by Prof. ALBERTO SANGIOVANNI-VINCENTELLI. The Problem. Current design tools are powerful can achieve different design goals But, they need users to help them interact with each other
E N D
A Design Metatool Rong Chen Mentors: Roberto Passerone, BassamTabbara Supervised by Prof. ALBERTO SANGIOVANNI-VINCENTELLI
The Problem • Current design tools • are powerful • can achieve different design goals • But, they • need users to help them interact with each other • hide inner design flow from users
Project Objective • Design a metatool to • capture different tools’ characteristics • show the design flow to users • make tools interact by themselves • be user-friendly (GUI)
Tool-Description Model • Describe tool characteristics • name • inputs and their formats • outputs and their formats • commands and options • etc.
Tool-Description Model • Build a tool-description model • language: UML • tools: Together/J • current model: small (a couple of classes) • expected model: large (many classes and packages) • scalability: good
Tool-Description Model Together/J PolisTool association visual design DataBase name command ... instance instance build-sg sg-to-c class dependence object
Tool-Description Model Together/J Public class PolisTool { public string name; private string command; ... private DataBase database1; } automaticaly genarated codes Public class DataBase { } …
Design Flow Navigation Internal model dependency o.s. sw build-sg c file esterel shift partition code size run time build-blif hw
Design Flow Navigation • Given input, find out all possible outputs • start from input node, visit all following nodes, then show nodes • Given input and output, find out design flow • start from input node, search output node, then show the path • Given output, find out necessary input • start from output node, retrieve all preceding nodes, then show nodes
Automated Tool Interaction • Objective • once given requirements, the whole design will be automatically carried out • Approach • the metatool interacts with O.S., gets run-time environment, launches different tools
Automated Tool Interaction metatool call ... Ptolemy VCC Polis Unix command done not done yet
Implementation • Language: Java • for good transportation • GUI design tool: AWT • for good transportation
Remarks • The core of the whole work is to build a proper tool-description model • Formal specification method (UML) is highly recommended here to maintain good scalability
Future Works • Future works • tool-description model needs to be further extended to include more tools • Inner data model needs to be developed to handle intermediate results • Enhanced GUI features are needed