A Prototyping Environment for Control-Oriented HW/SW Systems Using State-Charts, Activity-Charts and FPGA’s

A method for quickly designing and implementing HW/SW systems is described. The method is based on the model of a flexible target architecture consisting of a dedicated controller that interacts with one or more pro-cessing elements. From a Statemate ™ specification, the dedicated controller is extracted, and mapped onto a Xilinx ™ FPGA. The software part of the specification is translated to C code. The C routines are modified by a set of tools to provide the interface between the software part and the hardware part of the system. A sample application illustrates the feasibility of the approach.