An approach for hardware-software codesign

This paper presents a method for modeling and synthesizing mixed HW/SW systems. The proposed method starts from a full system-level specification. Systems are modeled in a synthesis-oriented manner by means of an extended finite state machine model. System-level synthesis is composed of three tasks: partitioning systems into inter-dependent sub-systems, inter-subsystem communication synthesis and architecture mapping onto a flexible architecture platform which includes both hardware and software components. The overall method is illustrated with an example