A unified model for hardware/software codesign

Abstract

Embedded systems are almost always built with parts implemented in both hardware and software. Market forces encourage such systems to be developed with dierent hardware-software decompositions to meet dierent points on the price-performance-power curve. Current design methodologies make the exploration of dierent hardware-software decompositions difficult because such exploration is both expensive and introduces signicant delays in time-to-market. This thesis addresses this problem by introducing, Bluespec Codesign Language (BCL), a united language model based on guarded atomic actions for hardware-software codesign. The model provides an easy way of specifying which parts of the design should be implemented in hardware and which in software without obscuring important design decisions. In addition to describing BCL's operational semantics, we formalize the equivalence of BCL programs and use this to mechanically verify design refinements. We describe the partitioning of a BCL program via computational domains and the compilation of dierent computational domains into hardware and software, respectively.