Abstract
With complexities of Systems-on-Chip rising almost daily, the design community has been searching for new vision that can handle given complexities with increased productivity and decreased times-to-market. The obvious solution, such as increasing levels of abstraction, introducing variety of IPs or offering new design languages will not solve the problem but only prolong the present status of inefficiency and confusion. What is needed is a drastic change in design methodology for prototyping embedded systems that consist of software and hardware. In order to gain in productivity, we need a new approach that will support efficient synthesis and verification of system software and hardware.
In order to find the solution, we will look first at the system gap between SW and HW designs and derive requirements for the design flow that includes software as well as hardware. In order to enable new FPGA tools for model generation, simulation, synthesis and verification, the design flow has to be well defined with unique model semantics and model transformations corresponding to design decisions made by the designers. We will introduce the concept of model refinement that supports this approach and can serve as an enabler for the extreme makeover of system design and system prototyping with FPGAs. We will support this concept with hard data and finish with a prediction and a roadmap toward the final goal of increasing productivity and reducing time-to-market by several orders of magnitude while reducing expertise level needed for design of embedded systems to the basic design principles only.

Short Bio
Daniel D. Gajski received the Dipl. Ing. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Zagreb, Croatia and the Ph.D. degree in Computer and Information Sciences from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
After 10 years of industrial experience in digital circuits, switching systems, supercomputer design, and VLSI structures, he spent 10 years in academia with the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Presently, he is a Professor in the Department of Information and Computer Science and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Irvine. His research interests are in embedded systems and information technology, design methodologies and e-design environments, specification languages and CAD software, and the science of design. He is editor of the book, Silicon Complication (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1988), a co-author of the books, High Level Synthesis: An Introduction to Chip and System Design (New York: Kluwer-Academic, 1992) and Specification and Design of Embedded Systems (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1994), and the author of Principles of Digital Design (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1995