A Unified Approach to Evaluation and Design of Hardware/Software Systems

This paper presents a unified approach to the design of application-specific systems which consist of both hardware and software components. Our approach is based on the development of an formal intermediate design representation which can be used to capture both hardware and software semantics. Evaluation of a hardware/software design can then be done automatically by simulating the design representation. The simulation results can directly be used to guide exploration of the design space so as to produce cost-effective solutions. The proposed approach supports a top-down design methodology which starts with a high-level behavioral specification and transforms it step-bystep into an efficient implementation by making design trade-offs between hardware and software.