System-level synthesis using re-programmable components

Abstract

The authors formulate the synthesis problem of complex behavioral descriptions with performance constraints as a hardware-software co-design problem. The target system architecture consists of a software component as a program running on a re-programmable processor assisted by application-specific hardware components. System synthesis is performed by first partitioning the input system description into hardware and software portions and then by implementing each of them separately. The synthesis of dedicated hardware is then achieved by means of hardware synthesis tools (D.D. Mitchell, D.C.Ku, F. Mailhot, and T. Truong, 'The Olympus Synthesis System for digital design' IEEE Design and Test Magazine, p.37-53, Oct. 1990), while the software component is generated using software compiling techniques. The authors consider the problem of identifying potential hardware and software components of a system described in a high-level modeling language and they present a partitioning procedure. They then describe the results of partitioning a network coprocessor. >