Efficient and scalable OpenMP-based system-level design

In this work we present an experimental environment for electronic system-level design based on the OpenMP programming paradigm. Fully compliant with the OpenMP standard, the environment allows the generation of heterogeneous hardware/software systems exhibiting good scalability with respect to the number of threads and limited performance overheads. Based on well-established OpenMP benchmarks, the paper also presents some comparisons with high-performance software implementations as well as with previous proposals oriented to pure hardware translation. The results confirm that the proposed approach achieves improved results in terms of both efficiency and scalability.