Automated Generation of Explicit Connectors for Component Based Hardware/Software Interaction in Embedded Real-Time Systems

The complexity of today’s embedded real-time systems is continuously growing with high demands on depend-ability, resource-efficiency, and reusability. Two solution approaches address these needs: First, in the component based software engineering (CBSE) paradigm, software is decomposed into self-contained components with explicit interactions and context dependencies. Connectors repre-sent the abstraction of interactions between these compo-nents. Second, components can be shifted from software to reconfigurable hardware, typically field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), in order to meet real-time constraints. This paper proposes a component-based concept to support efficient hardware/software co-design: A hardware com-ponent together with the hardware/software connector can seamlessly replace a software component with the same functionality, while the particularities of the alternative interaction are encapsulated in the component connector. Our approach provides for tools that can generate all nec-essary interaction mechanisms between hardware and soft-ware components. A proof-of-concept application demon-strates the advantages of our concept: Rapid change and comparison of different partitioning decisions due to au-tomated and faultless generation of the hardware/software connectors