Hardware and Software Synthesis of Heterogeneous Systems from Dataflow Programs

The new generation of multicore processors and reconfigurable hardware platforms provides a dramatic increase of the available parallelism and processing capabilities. However, one obstacle for exploiting all the promises of such platforms is deeply rooted in sequential thinking. The sequential programming model does not naturally expose potential parallelism that effectively permits to build parallel applications that can be efficiently mapped on different kind of platforms. A shift of paradigm is necessary at all levels of application development to yield portable and scalable implementations on the widest range of heterogeneous platforms. This paper presents a design flow for the hardware and software synthesis of heterogeneous systems allowing to automatically generate hardware and software components as well as appropriate interfaces, from a unique high-level description of the application, based on the dataflow paradigm, running onto heterogeneous architectures composed by reconfigurable hardware units and multicore processors. Experimental results based on the implementation of several video coding algorithms onto heterogeneous platforms are also provided to show the effectiveness of the approach both in terms of portability and scalability