Introspection lectures will be held every other Friday, from 3-4pm, in Taylor 3.128 (the Faculty Lounge). The dates and abstracts of scheduled presentations for Spring 1996 is given below:
The Airplane Information Management System (AIMS) of the Boeing 777 is an example where research in real-time scheduling and formal methods can help in maintaining complex safety-critical software. We shall describe how RTL, a formal notation for expressing real-time constraints can be used to precisely capture the timing requirements of AIMS. We shall also discuss theoretical and practical aspects of real-time scheduling in the design of cyclic executives and more dynamic real-time schedulers.
Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is a new chip technology that allows circuit designers to produce application specific integrated circuits instantaneously without going through the time-consuming fabrication process. An FPGA is a prefabricated chip populated with programmable switches, and it can be programmed on a desktop computer to implement arbitrary circuits by appropriately setting the positions of the switches inside the chip. FPGAs have the advantages of fast turnaround time and low manufacturing cost. Such advantages have led to increasing interest in the FPGA technology for a wide variety of applications (e.g. system prototyping, special-purpose configurable computing, logic emulation, etc.). As a relatively new technology, FPGA is constantly evolving in hardware programming technology, chip architecture, and CAD (computer-aided design) software. In this talk, we shall present a survey on our recent results on FPGA research.