Abstract
The common approach to include non-functional requirements in tool chains for hardware/software embedded systems requires developers to manually change the software code and/or the hardware, in an error-prone and tedious process. In the REFLECT research project we explore a novel approach where safety requirements are described using an aspect-and strategy-oriented programming language, named LARA, currently under development. The approach considers that the weavers in the tool chain use those safety requirements specified as aspects and strategies to produce final implementations according to specific design patterns. This paper presents our approach including LARA-based examples using an avionics application targeting the FPGA-based embedded systems consisting of a general purpose processor (GPP) coupled to custom computing units.

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Reconfigurable computing architectures are commonly used for accelerating applications and/or for achieving energy savings. However, most reconfigurable computing architectures suffer from computationally demanding placement and routing (P&R) steps. This problem may disable their use in systems requiring dynamic compilation (e.g., to guarantee application portability in embedded systems). Bearing in mind the simplification of P&R steps, this paper presents and analyzes a coarse-grained reconfigurable array (CGRA) extended with global multistage interconnect networks, specifically Omega Networks. We show that integrating one or two Omega Networks in a CGRA permits to simplify the P&R stage resulting in both low hardware resource overhead and low performance degradation (18% for an 8 x 8 array). We compare the proposed CGRA, which integrates one or two Omega Networks, with a CGRA based on a grid of processing elements with reach neighbor interconnections and with a torus topology. The execution time needed to perform the P&R stage for the two array architectures shows that the array using two Omega Networks needs a far simpler and faster P&R. The P&R stage in our approach completed on average in about 16 x less time for the 17 benchmarks used. Similar fast approaches needed CGRAs with more complex interconnect resources in order to allow most of the benchmarks used to be successfully placed and routed.

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