The Chinook Hardware/Software Co-Synthesis System

Designers of embedded systems are facing ever tighter constraints on design time. Unfortunately, tools today do not provide the right kind of help in the partitioning and mapping of a design onto hardware and software components. The Chinook co-synthesis system is an attempt to provide such a tool for control-dominated embedded system designs. It addresses the automation of the most time-consuming and error-prone tasks in embedded controller design, namely: the synthesis of interface hardware and software needed to integrate system components; the migration of functions between processors or custom logic; and the co-simulation of the design before and after synthesis. This paper describes the principal elements of Chinook and discusses its application to a variety of embedded designs. The Chinook Hardware/Software Co-Synthesis System 1 camera out digitizer in out IR recv in out scaler in out decomp in out compress in out IR xmit in out Figure 1: The infrared video-wristwatch system. The camera unit transmits compressed video packets to a wrist-watch display.