A Novel Hardware/Software Codesign Methodology Based on Dynamic Reconfiguration with Impulse C and Codeveloper

The design of embedded systems has rapidly changed during the last decade. It is possible to identify two main responsible factors: hardware/software codesign and dynamic reconfiguration. The work presented in this paper tries to investigate how to consider the reconfiguration as an explicit dimension in the design flow for embedded systems. This work addresses the challenge introduced by the partial dynamic reconfiguration trying to propose a novel design flow, using the CoDeveloper framework to speedup the design process. The proposed flow allows the designer to define his/her desired specification using an high level design language such as C. Finally, it provides results showing how the proposed flow can be used by the designer to have more information useful in making the correct decisions during the design of his/her embedded system.

1. Introduction

Todays embedded systems are no longer viewed as isolated static monads: they change themselves their functionality and interact among them and with the environment. The successful deployment of such networked embedded systems to the market requires the identification, formalization and implementation of concepts, methods, and tools that are able to ease the development of software components and the implementation of the system architecture. In order to cope with these new requirements, the design of embeddedsystems has changed thanks to hardware/software codesign and dynamic reconfiguration.