LYCOS: the Lyngby Co-Synthesis System

. This paper describes the LYCOS system, an experimental co-synthesis environment. We present the motivation and philosophy of LYCOS and after an overview of the entire system, the individual parts are described. We use a single CPU, single ASIC target architecture and we describe the techniques we use to estimate metrics concerning hardware, software and communication in this architecture. Finally we present a novel partitioning technique called PACE, which has shown to produce excellent results, and we demonstrate how partitioning is used to do design space exploration. Keywords: codesign, co-synthesis, hardware/software partitioning, analysis, estimation 1. Introduction Hardware/software partitioning is often viewed as the synthesis of a target architecture consisting of a single CPU and a single dedicated hardware component (full custom, FPGA, etc.) from an initial system specification, e.g. as in [15]. The partitioning onto such a target architecture is depicted in figure 1. Eve..