Prototyping of tightly coupled hardware/software-systems

Verification and test issues raise the need for rapid prototyping of complex systems and especially hardware/software-systems. We tackle this problem by integration of hardware/software-codesign and prototyping. First we define the concept of the entire system architecture. This concept directs the hardware/software-partitioning process. Our prototyping environment reflects the architecture concept as well. In this overview the architecture concept and all important design tasks (hardware/software-partitioning, speed-up estimation before HW-synthesis, and prototyping of the entire hardware/software-system) are presented and compared to several approaches from literature. Thus a substantial overview over the prototyping problem is given. The latter part of this presentation illustrates our approach by a case study and presents the results. Our automated design process generates a tightly coupled hardware/software-system with very good performance characteristics. The case study focus on the prototyping of a ciphering algorithm. The reported approach leads to a reasonable overall system speed-up of 10%. Similar results have been found for further examples as well.