Madeo: High-Level Tools and Object Methodology for Reconfigurable Architectures by Loic Lagadec
Madeo is an open framework taking advantage of the Smalltalk concepts to specify and implement applications as circuits on reconfigurable architectures. Madeo is divided in three main layers: application specification, reconfigurable target modelling, back-end tools. Applications appear as Smalltalk methods with high-level custom types (Intervals, Galois Fields, etc), used to generate circuits as graphs of logic gates (RTL netlists). The Madeo framework defines a design-space exploration-capable meta-model for reconfigurable architecture modelling, that is instantiated using a DSL hardware description language. The back-end tools implement applications through flooplanning, tiling and placing/routing the RTL netlist, using the meta-model API. Madeo has been being developed for more than ten years and has demonstrated to be a perennial framework that exhibits innovative features, high reuse and short development time, as well as high abstraction and great extensibility. Madeo also served as an educational material for CS master students. This talk will summarize the Madeo evolutions over the last decades that have made Madeo a success. A special emphasis will be set on reuse, minimal kernel oriented refactoring and methodology changes under cross project and multi-developers coherence constraints. Some technical key points are meta-model extension (for nanoscale emerging technologies), model-aware back-end tools substitution on demand vs. generic tools reuse, and tool chain integration.
Bio: Loic Lagadec earned his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the Université de Rennes 1 (France), in 2000. In February 2002, he joined the faculty of the Université de Bretagne Occidentale as a "Maitre de Conférences". His research interests include applying object oriented development techniques for the development of novel CAD tools targeting reconfigurable architectures and, recently, emerging nanotechnologies. He is the main contributor to the Madeo framework and has been involved in several projects including national and European projects. His teaching activities are centred on Smalltalk courses and software engineering including XP practices. He will be in charge of the physical tools for reconfigurable architectures course in the new embedded systems master opening next year at the Université de Bretagne Occidentale. media.Madeo has been (re)used in one RNTL (Réseau National des Technologies Logicielles) project (OSGAR 2002-2005), one FP6 project (Morpheus 2005-2008), one PRIR (Région Bretagne) project (ValMadeo) and is currently under redesign to address nano-architectures.