I/O Modeling and Refinement for HW/SW Codesign of Embedded Systems

Different levels of abstraction for I/O modeling are used depending on the codesign step. However, manually changing the abstraction level of I/O models at each design step is laborious. Moreover, the designer may want to mix the level of abstraction between the I/O models and the simulation. Thus, it is very desirable to make the I/O modeling retargettable and configurable. In this paper we propose an I/O modeling and refinement technique in a codesign methodology where an I/O device and its interface code with various levels of abstraction is automatically integrated and finally simulated in the unified framework. We demonstrate the viability of the proposed methodology with videophone example that consists of H.263 codec accessing camera and LCD, network control task accessing Ethernet device and G.723 codec accessing microphone and speaker.