Deprettere, “System design using Kahn process networks: The Compaan/Laura approach

New emerging embedded system platforms in the realm of high-throughput multimedia, imaging, and signal processing will consist of multiple microprocessors and reconfigurable components. One of the major problems is how to program these platforms in a sys-tematic and automated way so as to satisfy the performance need of applications executed on these platforms. In this paper, we present our system design approach as an effi-cient solution to this programming problem. We show how for an application written in Matlab, a Kahn Process Network specifica-tion can automatically be derived and systematically mapped onto a target platform composed of a microprocessor and an FPGA. Furthermore, we illustrate how the mapping approach is applied on a real-life example, namely an M-JPEG encoder. 1