Hardware-software Co-synthesis for Digital Systems

As the complexity of system design increases, use of pre-designed components, such as generalpurpose microprocessors, provides an effective way to reduce the complexity of synthesized hardware. While the design problem of systems that contain processors and ASIC chips is not new, computeraided synthesis of such heterogeneous or mixed systems poses challenging problems because of the differences in model and rate of computation by application-specific hardware and processor software. In this article, we demonstrate the feasibility of achieving synthesis of heterogeneous systems which uses timing constraints to delegate tasks between hardware and software such that the final implementation meets required performance constraints. 1 Introduction Most digital systems used for dedicated applications consist of general-purpose processors, memory and application-specific hardware circuits. Examples of such embedded systems can be found in medical instrumentation, process control, automated ve..