Hardware and Software Representation, Optimization, and Co-synthesis for Embedded Systems

Current software and hardware co-synthesis methodologies of control dominated embedded systems focus primarily on improving productivity in the complex design process. In order to improve synthesis quality, we propose a methodology that incorporates data flow and control optimizations performed on a novel implementation independent design task representation. The approach is applicable to any co-synthesis tool; we use a public domain co-design environment to report some results of our investigation. The data collected shows that performing such optimizations on an adequate representation can lead to considerable size and performance improvements in both the synthesized software and hardware.