Automatic generation of hardware/software interfaces
Name
Arvind-Automatic Generation.pdf
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482.31 KB
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Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
a07a3c70275a2d7707eabc7da73cc5a7
Author(s)
King, Myron Decker
Dave, Nirav H.
Mithal, Arvind
Date Issued
March 2012
Journal
Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, ASPLOS '12
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
Citation
King, Myron, Nirav Dave, and Arvind. “Automatic Generation of Hardware/software Interfaces.” in ASPLOS '12: Proceedings of the seventeenth international conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, ACM Press, 2012. p. 325-336. Web.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Enabling new applications for mobile devices often requires the use of specialized hardware to reduce power consumption. Because of time-to-market pressure, current design methodologies for embedded applications require an early partitioning of the design, allowing the hardware and software to be developed simultaneously, each adhering to a rigid interface contract. This approach is problematic for two reasons: (1) a detailed hardware-software interface is difficult to specify until one is deep into the design process, and (2) it prevents the later migration of functionality across the interface motivated by efficiency concerns or the addition of features. We address this problem using the Bluespec Codesign Language~(BCL) which permits the designer to specify the hardware-software partition in the source code, allowing the compiler to synthesize efficient software and hardware along with transactors for communication between the partitions. The movement of functionality across the hardware-software boundary is accomplished by simply specifying a new partitioning, and since the compiler automatically generates the desired interface specifications, it eliminates yet another error-prone design task. In this paper we present BCL, an extension of a commercially available hardware design language (Bluespec SystemVerilog), a new software compiling scheme, and preliminary results generated using our compiler for various hardware-software decompositions of an Ogg Vorbis audio decoder, and a ray-tracing application.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1145/2150976.2151011
