A Model-Based Approach to System-Level Co-Design

In this paper we present an object-oriented approach and a development environment for the systemlevel design of run-time reconfigurable computer systems. We use the Unified Modeling Language for the specification, modeling, and visualization throughout all phases of development. In this way we address a number of problems which are common to system-level development, like comprehensible and complete system representation, platform-independence, and seamless transition from specification to implementation. Further we show how object-oriented applications can be implemented and executed on custom computing machines comprising run-time reconfigurable logic resources and how the problem of hardware platform mapping can be solved in such an environment. Finally we present experimental results that indicate the feasibility of our approach.