Invited: Hardware/Software Co-Synthesis and Co-Optimization for Autonomous Systems

With ever more complicated functionalities being integrated in modern autonomous systems, traditional design methods may not remain sufficient to deliver trusted and high-performance systems with stringent temporal, safety and cost efficiency requirements. In this paper, we discuss the limitations of the traditional design methods with the above requirements enforced, in which hardware and software design are often considered separately. To tackle these limitations, this paper presents a novel design solution that synthesizes both software-level and hardware-level design. First, we highlight and analyze the interconnections between software-level methods (e.g. priority assignment and task allocation) and hardware design (e.g. cache and memory management), in terms of the resulting system performance, e.g. latency. Second, by applying the identified interconnections, we propose an optimization framework to produce high-quality synthesized solutions of both software and h ardware design based on a set of candidate design methods. In addition, we describe potential research directions derived from the work and major challenges that can be investigated jointly by engineers and researchers from embedded systems, system safety and programming languages communities.