Preemptive HW/SW-Threading by combining ESL methodology and coarse grained reconfiguration

Modern systems fulfil calculation tasks across the hardware- software boundary. Tasks are divided into coarse parallel subtasks that run on distributed resources. These resources are classified into a software (SW) and a hardware (HW) domain. The software domain usually contains processors for general purpose or digital signal calculations. Dedicated co-processors such as encryption or video en-/decoding units belong to the hardware domain. Nowadays, a decision in which domain a certain subtask will be executed in a system is usually taken during system level design. This is done on the basis of certain assumptions about the system requirements that might not hold at runtime. The HW/SW partitioning is static and cannot adapt to dynamically changing system requirements at runtime. Our contribution to tackle this, is to combine a ESL based HW/SW codesign methodology with a coarse grained reconfigurable System on Chip architecture. We propose this as Preemptive HW/SW-Threading