Multitasking in hardware-software codesign for reconfigurable computer

This paper presents a new approach for modeling hardware and software tasks in codesign system. The model has the advantage that the hardware tasks are structured in a way that is compatible with the software tasks. As a result, both hardware and software tasks can be managed in a uniform manner using a single task manager. A hardware/software partitioning and schedule algorithm is developed to automatically map the tasks to the codesign resources to minimize the processing time (makespan). The practicality of our approach is demonstrated with an implementation of dummy tasks for an existing reconfigurable computer, the UltraSONIC. The results show that our approach is promising for a real application.