The COSYMA environment for hardware/software cosynthesis of small embedded systems

COSYMA is a platform for the investigation of hardware/software cosynthesis of small embedded systems. Target architecture is currently limited to processor-coprocessor configurations executing a single process or a system of communicating processes which are statically scheduled. Many aspects of cosynthesis such as automatic hardware/software partitioning, efficient hardware/software communication, timing and hardware overhead estimation and analysis, interdependence of different cosynthesis phases, data representation, etc., can successfully be investigated in this manageable domain. COSYMA covers the complete design flow from an input language similar to C down to netlist and object code. Current focus is on high performance data dominated systems, but first steps to incorporate control dominated subtasks can be presented. Using a specific high-level synthesis tool, the results show a considerable speedup of the resulting processor-coprocessor system even compared to modern RISC processors which is typically limited by memory bandwidth.