A Design Metatool

Supervised byProf. ALBERTO SANGIOVANNI-VINCENTELLI

Rong ChenMentors: Roberto Passerone,

BassamTabbara

The Problem

Current design tools are powerful can achieve different design goals

But, they need users to help them interact with

each other hide inner design flow from users

Project Objective

Design a metatool to capture different tools’ characteristics show the design flow to users make tools interact by themselves be user-friendly (GUI)

Tool-Description Model

Describe tool characteristics name inputs and their formats outputs and their formats commands and options etc.

Tool-Description Model

Build a tool-description model language: UML tools: Together/J current model: small (a couple of

classes) expected model: large (many classes

and packages) scalability: good

Tool-Description Model

PolisTool DataBase

build-sg sg-to-c

association

instanceinstance

dependence

class

object

Together/J

visualdesign

namecommand ...

Tool-Description Model

Public class PolisTool{public string name;private string command;...private DataBase database1;}

Public class DataBase{}

…

automaticalygenaratedcodes

Together/J

Design Flow Navigation

Internal model dependency

esterel shift partition

build-sg

build-blif

o.s.

c file

code sizerun time

sw

hw

Design Flow Navigation

Given input, find out all possible outputs start from input node, visit all following nodes, then show nodes

Given input and output, find out design flow start from input node, search output node, then show the path

Given output, find out necessary input start from output node, retrieve all preceding nodes, then show

nodes

Automated Tool Interaction

Objective once given requirements, the whole

design will be automatically carried out

Approach the metatool interacts with O.S., gets

run-time environment, launches different tools

Automated Tool Interaction

metatool

...

Un

ix c

om

man

d

Polis

Pto

lem

y

VC

C

call

donenot done yet

Implementation

Language: Java for good transportation

GUI design tool: AWT for good transportation

Remarks

The core of the whole work is to build a proper tool-description model

Formal specification method (UML) is highly recommended here to maintain good scalability

Future Works

Future works tool-description model needs to be

further extended to include more tools Inner data model needs to be

developed to handle intermediate results

Enhanced GUI features are needed