Creating HW/SW Co-Designed MPSoPC’s from High Level Programming Models

FPGA densities have continued to follow Moore’s law and can now support a complete multiprocessor system on pro-grammable chip. The benefits of the FPGA include the abil-ity to build a customized MPSoC system consisting of het-erogeneous processing resources, interconnects and mem-ory hierarchies that best match the requirements of each application. In this paper we outline a new approach that allows users to drive the generation of a complete hardware/software co-designed multiprocessor system on programmable chip from an unaltered standard high level programming model. We use OpenCL as our specifica-tion framework and show how key API’s are extracted and used to automatically create a distributed shared mem-ory multiprocessor system on chip architecture for Xilinx FPGA’s. We show how OpenCL API’s are easily translated to hthreads, a hardware-based microkernel operating sys-tem to provide pthreads compliant run time services within the MPSoPC architecture