Readings In Hardware Software Co Design

This title serves as an introduction ans reference for the field, with the papers that have shaped the hardware/software co-design since its inception in the early 90s.

Introduces different tasks of hardware/software co-design, including system specification, hardware/software partitioning, co-synthesis, and co-simulation. Summarizes and classifies co-design tools and methods for these tasks, and presents the co-design tool COOL, useful for solving co-design tasks for the class of data-flow dominated embedded systems. Primary emphasis is on hardware/software partitioning and the co-synthesis phase and their coupling. A mathematical formulation of the hardware/software partitioning problem is given, and several novel approaches are presented and compared for solving the partitioning problem. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Introduction to Hardware-Software Co-Design presents a number of issues of fundamental importance for the design of integrated hardware software products such as embedded, communication, and multimedia systems. This book is a comprehensive introduction to the fundamentals of hardware/software co-design. Co-design is still a new field but one which has substantially matured over the past few years. This book, written by leading international experts, covers all the major topics including: fundamental issues in co-design; hardware/software co-synthesis algorithms; prototyping and emulation; target architectures; compiler techniques; specification and verification; system-level specification. Special chapters describe in detail several leading-edge co-design systems including Cosyma, LYCOS, and Cosmos. Introduction to Hardware-Software Co-Design contains sufficient material for use by teachers and students in an advanced course of hardware/software co-design. It also contains extensive explanation of the fundamental concepts of the subject and the necessary background to bring practitioners up-to-date on this increasingly important topic.

This textbook serves as an introduction to the subject of embedded systems design, with emphasis on integration of custom hardware components with software. The key problem addressed in the book is the following: how can an embedded systems designer strike a balance between flexibility and efficiency? The book describes how combining hardware design with software design leads to a solution to this important computer engineering problem. The book covers four topics in hardware/software codesign: fundamentals, the design space of custom architectures, the hardware/software interface and application examples. The book comes with an associated design environment that helps the reader to perform experiments in hardware/software codesign. Each chapter also includes exercises and further reading suggestions. Improvements in this second edition include labs and examples using modern FPGA environments from Xilinx and Altera, which will make the material in this book applicable to a greater number of courses where these tools are already in use. More examples and exercises have been added throughout the book. “If I were teaching a course on this subject, I would use this as a resource and text. If I were a student who wanted to learn codesign, I would look for a course that at least used a similar approach. If I were an engineer or engineering manager who wanted to learn more about codesign from a very practical perspective, I would read this book first before any other. When I first started learning about codesign as a practitioner, a book like this would have been the perfect introduction.” --Grant Martin, Tensilica--

Co-Design is the set of emerging techniques which allows for the simultaneous design of Hardware and Software. In many cases where the application is very demanding in terms of various performances (time, surface, power consumption), trade-offs between dedicated hardware and dedicated software are becoming increasingly difficult to decide upon in the early stages of a design. Verification techniques - such as simulation or proof techniques - that have proven necessary in the hardware design must be dramatically adapted to the simultaneous verification of Software and Hardware. Describing the latest tools available for both Co-Design and Co-Verification of systems, Hardware/Software Co-Design and Co-Verification offers a complete look at this evolving set of procedures for CAD environments. The book considers all trade-offs that have to be made when co-designing a system. Several models are presented for determining the optimum solution to any co-design problem, including partitioning, architecture synthesis and code generation. When deciding on trade-offs, one of the main factors to be considered is the flow of communication, especially to and from the outside world. This involves the modeling of communication protocols. An approach to the synthesis of interface circuits in the context of co-design is presented. Other chapters present a co-design oriented flexible component data-base and retrieval methods; a case study of an ethernet bridge, designed using LOTOS and co-design methodologies and finally a programmable user interface based on monitors. Hardware/Software Co-Design and Co-Verification will help designers and researchers to understand these latest techniques in system design and as such will be of interest to all involved in embedded system design.

Current practice dictates the separation of the hardware and software development paths early in the design cycle. These paths remain independent with very little interaction occurring between them until system integration. In particular, hardware is often specified without fully appreciating the computational requirements of the software. Also, software development does not influence hardware development and does not track changes made during the hardware design phase. Thus, the ability to explore hardware/software tradeoffs is restricted, such as the movement of functionality from the software domain to the hardware domain (and vice-versa) or the modification of the hardware/software interface. As a result, problems that are encountered during system integration may require modification of the software and/or hardware, resulting in potentially significant cost increases and schedule overruns. To address the problems described above, a cooperative design approach, one that utilizes a unified view of hardware and software, is described. This approach is called hardware/software codesign. The Codesign of Embedded Systems develops several fundamental hardware/software codesign concepts and a methodology that supports them. A unified representation, referred to as a decomposition graph, is presented which can be used to describe hardware or software using either functional abstractions or data abstractions. Using a unified representation based on functional abstractions, an abstract hardware/software model has been implemented in a common simulation environment called ADEPT (Advanced Design Environment Prototyping Tool). This model permits early hardware/software evaluation and tradeoff exploration. Techniques have been developed which support the identification of software bottlenecks and the evaluation of design alternatives with respect to multiple metrics. The application of the model is demonstrated on several examples. A unified representation based on data abstractions is also explored. This work leads to investigations regarding the application of object-oriented techniques to hardware design. The Codesign of Embedded Systems: A Unified Hardware/Software Representation describes a novel approach to a topic of immense importance to CAD researchers and designers alike.