Designing embedded processors becomes increasingly flexible since tool suites from major vendors allow the designer to customize in multiple ways including instruction set extensions. The designer faces then the problem to explore a large design space in order to find solutions that comply to given constraints (e.g. performance) with minimal area and/or minimal power consumption etc. The talk is twofold: in the first part it gives an overview of the author s past work in the field including design space exploration for extensible embedded processors. The second part focuses on our RISPP processor platform. It is an adaptive extensible embedded processor that adjusts to varying constraints during rune time. Research is focused towards the question of what should be fixed at design time and what parts should be left flexible/adjustable at rune-time. Besides a prototype in form of an FPGA platform, a coupe of tools have been built in our lab to evaluate our approach. Though not limited to multi-media applications we demonstrate the functionality of RISPP by means of a video streaming application.
Short Bio J. Henkel:
Dr. Henkel received his Master and Ph.D ("Summa cum laude") degrees both from the Technical University of Braunschweig, Germany. He then joined the Computer & Communication Research Laboratories CCRL (now NEC Laboratories America) in Princeton, NJ, where he led various projects in the areas of low power system level design and advanced embedded architectures. In between, he had an appointment as a visiting professor at the University of Notre Dame, IN. Dr. Henkel is currently with Karlsruhe University (TH), Germany, where he is directing the Chair for Embedded Systems CES. He has served or is serving as a program committee member for major conferences in electronic design automation and embedded system design like DAC, ICCAD, DATE, ASP-DAC, ISLPED, Codes-ISSS, CASES, RTSS, ECRTS, RSP and others. He has given full-day tutorials at conferences like DAC, ICCAD, DATE and others in the area of embedded system design. He was the chair of the PhD Forum at the DATE Conference in 2006 and 2007. In 2001 he served as a Program Chair for the IEEE/ACM Codes Hardware/Software Co-design Symposium and was a General of the same convention in 2002. Furthermore, he was a Program Chair for the 2002 IEEE Workshop on Rapid System Prototyping. In 2006 he served as a Program Chair for the IEEE/ACM Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design (ISLPED). He has guest-edited special issues on hardware/software co-design in the IEEE Computer Magazine and on rapid system prototyping with Kluwer. He is currently an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on VLSI Systems. From 2008 on Dr. Henkel is a steering committee member of ICCAD. Recently (in June 2007) his edited book "Designing Embedded Processors -- A Low Power Perspective" was published by Springer. Dr. Henkel is the Chair of the IEEE Computer Society, Germany Section. He holds eight US patents and is also a Senior Member of the IEEE.
