Steady advances in enabling technologies such as semiconductor circuits, wireless networking, and micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) are making possible the design of complex distributed (networked) embedded systems which are expected to benefit important application areas such as public infrastructure, industrial automation, automotive industry, and consumer electronics. However, the heterogeneous and distributed nature of many such systems requires design teams with a multifaceted set of skills spanning automatic control, communication networks, and hardware/software computational systems. Computer-aided design, a traditionally interdisciplinary research area, is instrumental in making these systems feasible and in enhancing the productivity of the design process. This NSF CAREER research is developing new modeling techniques, optimization algorithms, communication protocols, and interface processes that combined yield a novel design automation flow for distributed embedded-control applications that must depend on networked communication, such as automotive "X-by-wire systems" and integrated buildings. The goal is both to simplify the integrated design and validation of these systems and to foster collaboration among engineers with different expertise. Research contributions include new methods for the robust deployment of real-time embedded software and for the synthesis of distributed implementations that meet performance requirements while balancing the usage of communication and computational resources. The companion educational program is founded on the belief that the academic curriculum needs to be updated in order to overcome the historical and artificial boundaries among those disciplines in electrical engineering and computer science that lie at the core of embedded computing.
