Using SDL for Hardware/Software Co-Design of an ATM Network Interface Card

The Co-design is the process of generating a mixed hardware/software architecture starting from system-level model. This paper discusses the uses of SDL for the co-design of an ATM Network Interface Card (NIC). In this study, the initial specification is given in SDL. The architecture generation is made using Cosmos, a co-design tool for multiprocessor architecture. Several architectures are produced starting from the same initial SDL specification. The performance evaluation of these solutions was made using hardware/software co-simulation. This paper describes the experiment and the lessons learned about the capabilities and the restrictions of SDL and Cosmos for hardware/software co-design of distributed systems. The use of SDL allows for drastic reduction of the model size when compared to hardware/software model given in C/VHDL. SDL simulation may be 30 times faster than C/VHDL simulation.