Automated partitioning for HW/SW implementations of factory communication protocols based on SDL

Abstract

We present our approach to mixed hardware/software implementations of factory communication protocols. We start from a single system specification based on SDL (specification and description language). The main task consists of identifying the parts which when implemented in hardware would lead to the biggest gain in overall system performance. In order to achieve this we introduce a three stage solution. Within the first phase we use the environment dependence properties of control dominated systems to reduce the complexity of the next stages. Therefore we build a combined state machine from the existing CFSMs and identify the paths through it which are relevant to a speed up of the system. The second step exploits a new colouring algorithm in order to schedule the tasks of our program. In our case this means the SDL specification. This algorithm can be applied either to find the maximum degree of parallelism or to find the shortest schedule for a given number of parallel resources. The third step allocates the tasks to the system resources distributing the functionality between hardware and software elements. To exhibit the structural features of our approach we introduce SDL specification pictures if necessary.