A Methodology for Control-Dominated System Codesign

This paper presents a methodology and a supporting framework for the design of systems composed of hardware and software modules. The aim is to define an approach, tailored for control-oriented applications, to manage system cospecification, high-level partitioning, hw/sw tradeoffs and cosynthesis. The main goals are always to improve design time and costs by supporting a flexible architectural exploration and to achieve a smooth integration within standard industrial design environments. Our research effort focuses on fulfilling the goal of linking high-level specifications to efficient and cost-effective hw/sw implementations by investigating techniques such as synchronous cospecification styles, direct machine code generation as well as exploiting the capability of commercial VHDL synthesizers.