A Comparison of C/C++-based Software/Hardware Co-design Description Languages

Many description languages are used in hardware/software co-design of embedded systems. This paper presents the programming characteristics, structure peculiarities and design flow of three kinds of co-design description language based on C/C++: SystemC, ImpulseC and SpecC, which are quite effective in system-level design. This paper also introduces a co-design method based on Model Driven Architecture so that the mapping between UML and different design languages can be implemented by model transformation automatically. Then the abstraction level of the system design can be improved when the dimensions and complication be reduced. On the other hand, the advantages of various co-design languages can be utilized synthetically.