Synthesis of the Hardware/Software Interface in Microcontroller-Based Systems

Microcontroller-based systems require the design of a hardware/software interface that enables software running on the microcontroller to control external devices. This interface consists of the sequential logic that physically connects the devices to the microcontroller and the software drivers that allow code to access the device functions. This paper presents a method for automatically synthesizing this hardware/software interface using a recursive algorithm. Practical examples are used to demonstrate the utility of the method and results indicate that the synthesized circuit and driver code are comparable to that generated by human designers. This new tool will be used by higher-level synthesis tools to evaluate partitionings of a system between hardware and software components.