Device Driver and DMA Controller Synthesis from HW /SW Communication Protocol Specifications

We have separated the information required for HW/SW interface synthesis into three parts, the protocol specification, the operating system related information, and the processor related information. From these inputs a synthesis tool generates (a) device driver functions or (b) a combination of device driver functions and a DMA controller, depending on a designer’s decision. The clean separation of information facilitates (1) efficient design space exploration with combinations of different processors, operating systems and protocols, and (2) maintaining a large number of different versions and variants of HW/SW interfaces by synthesising them on demand. Protocols are specified as a grammar, which is fully independent of architecture and implementation. From this the synthesis tool generates device driver code in C and/or synthesizable RTL code in VHDL for DMA controllers. After the initial selection of implementation alternatives the presented methods are fully automated. Its computational complexity is quadratic in terms of the number of states. With real-life examples we show that the quality of the generated code is close to hand written quality in terms of performance, area and code size.