Protocol selection and interface generation for HW-SW codesign

|The aim of this paper is to present a communication synthesis approach stated as an allocation problem. In the proposed approach, communication synthesis allows to transform a system composed of processes that communicate via high level primitives through abstract channels into a set of processes executed by interconnected processors that communicate via signals and share communication control. The proposed communication synthesis approach deals with both protocol selection and interface generation and is based on binding/allocation of communication units. This approach allows a wide design space exploration through automatic selection of communication protocols. We present a new algorithm that performs binding/allocation of communication units. This algorithm makes use of a cost function to evaluate di erent allocation alternatives. We illustrate through an example the usefulness of the algorithm for allocating automatically di erent protocols within the same application system. Keywords|Hardware/software codesign, Communication synthesis, Protocol selection/allocation, Interface generation