Curriculum vitae (pdf, en, 50 KB, 10/23/13)

Professional Activities
• Co-chair for the track entitled ”Hardware/Software Co-design and Design Automation” of the IEEE/IFIP
International Conference on Embedded and Ubiquitous Computing (EUC), 2014.
• Program committee member of the IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Embedded and Ubiquitous
Computing (EUC), 2013.
• Delegate of the Computer Science Ph.D. students in the Computer Science Department Council, University
of Verona (2010-2013).
• Reviewer (or secondary reviewer) for IEEE/ACM conferences, including IEEE/ACM CODES+ISSS,
IEEE/ACM DATE, IEEE/ACM DAC, IEEE DSD, ECSI/IEEE FDL, ACM/IEEE MEMOCODE, IEEE
SIES, IEEE VLSI, IFIP/IEEE VLSI-SOC, IEEE HLDVT, IEEE/IFIP EUC.
Research interests
The main interest of Sara Vinco’s research is the integration and simulation of heterogeneous embedded systems.
In particular, the activity carried out in the latest years spans over the following research lines: integration
of heterogeneous components via interface generation, homogeneous formal modeling of heterogeneous components
to achieve homogeneous simulation, and software generation.
INTEGRATION OF HETEROGENEOUS COMPONENTS VIA INTERFACE GENERATION
Modern embedded systems are highly heterogeneous, as they are composed of a mix of analog and digital
HW, as well as embedded SW. Furthermore, the tight bound with the physical environment implies to take into
account physical evolution during the design and verification phases. In this context, reuse is a very difficult
task, as the components to integrate are highly heterogeneous. On the other hand, reuse is a winning approach
to save design cost and time. Indeed, top-down approaches allow to optimize and configure each step of design,
but any time that a component must be added or changed, the whole design flow must be undergone again.
Given these motivations, the main goal of this research is to develop a methodology that allows to automate
the integration process. Sara Vinco proposed an innovative methodology for determining the necessary interfaces.
The IP-XACT description of the heterogeneous components is analyzed to gather information about
their domain and interface. The IP-XACT design description is then exploited to determine the desired connections
between components. A taxonomy allows then to determine the necessary connecting components to
be generated [IC.15],[IC.10].
This step must then be followed by generation of the interfaces. This is a very error prone and time consuming
process, as interface designers rarely have a deep expertise of the involved components. As a result,
automatic interface generation is preferable. Sara Vinco extended the state of the art by focusing on the generation
of two types of interfaces: soft drivers and device drivers.
Soft drivers are interfaces allowing communication between software components. When existing software
has to be reused, it may indeed be necessary to map the services invoked to the correct signature exported by
an existing component, or to protect shared data. These tasks are the goal of soft drivers. Their implementation
is usually associated with software engineering, rather than with embedded design. However, their generation
is critical when integrating a heterogeneous system. Sara Vinco proposed a flow for automatic generation of
soft drivers, taking into account the desired type of communication [IC.8].
Device drivers constitute the interface between the hardware and the software domain. Their implementation
is very complex, as the device driver must comply both with the device communication protocol and with
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