A unified hardware/software co-synthesis solution for signal processing systems

Abstract

This paper presents a methodology to specify from a high-level data-flow description an application for both hardware and software synthesis. Firstly, an introduction to RVC-Cal data-flow programming and Orcc framework is presented. Furthermore, an analysis of a close to gate intermediate representation (XLIM) is bestowed. As a proof of concept a JPEG codec was written purely in RVC-Cal to test the co-synthesis tools and then an analysis of the generated hardware and software results are given. Our experience shows that using RVC-Cal can unify the process of creating the same application for software and hardware without modifying a single source code for each solution.