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Prototyping of Tightly Coupled Hardware/Software-Systems

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Abstract

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 percent. Similar results have been found for further examples as well.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Paderborn, Fürstenallee 11, 33 102, Paderborn, Germany

    Wolfram Hardt

  2. University of Tübingen, Sand 13, 72 076, Tübingen, Germany

    Wolfgang Rosenstiel

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  1. Wolfram Hardt
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  2. Wolfgang Rosenstiel
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Hardt, W., Rosenstiel, W. Prototyping of Tightly Coupled Hardware/Software-Systems. Design Automation for Embedded Systems 2, 283–317 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008887603213

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