VHDL system-level specification and partitioning in a hardware/software co-synthesis environment

This paper deals with the problems of system-level specification and partitioning in hardware/software co-design. It first discusses the implication of using VHDL as an implementation-independent specification language. A message passing communication mechanism is proposed to relax the strict synchronization imposed by the simulation-based semantics of VHDL. A partitioning technique is then described which is used to partition the VHDL specification into a hardware part and a software part. The partitioning is carried out during the compilation process of VHDL into a design representation which identifies the hardware/software boundary, while capturing hardware and software in a uniform way to allow efficient co-synthesis of both parts. The VHDL compiler and the partitioning algorithm function as the front end of a hardware/software co-synthesis environment which is built on the design representation.