Towards automating hardware/software co-design

Abstract

We propose a new flow for hardware/software co-design that forms a base for further automation attempts of the co-design process. Our proposed flow starts with a software-only solution in which all system functionality is described as embedded software written in C targeting a selected platform. Then, the flow iterates through co-verification, profiling, partitioning, and co-synthesis until the design criteria are met. We present two test cases to show the effectiveness of our proposed methodology.