Synthesis and Simulation of Digital Systems Containing Interacting Hardware and Software Components

Synthesis of systems containing application-specific as well as reprogrammable components, such as off-the-shelf microprocessors, provides a promising approach to realization of complex systems using a minimal amount of application-specific hardware while still meeting the required performance constraints. We describe an approach to synthesis of such hardware-software systems starting from a behavioral description as input. The input system model is partitioned into hardware and software components based on imposed performance constraints. Synchronization between various elements of a mixed system design is one of the key issues that any synthesis system must address. In this paper, we consider software and interface synchronization schemes that facilitate communication between system components. We present tools to perform synthesis and simulation of a system description into hardware and software components. In particular, we describe a program, Poseidon, that performs concurrent eve..