Creating HW/SW co-designed MPSoPC´s from high level programming models

FPGA densities have continued to follow Moore´s law and can now support a complete multiprocessor system on programmable chip. The benefits of the FPGA include the ability to build a customized MPSoC system consisting of heterogeneous processing resources, interconnects and memory hierarchies that best match the requirements of each application. In this paper we outline a new approach that allows users to drive the generation of a complete hardware/software co-designed multiprocessor system on programmable chip from an unaltered standard high level programming model. We use OpenCL as our specification framework and show how key API´s are extracted and used to automatically create a distributed shared memory multiprocessor system on chip architecture for Xilinx FPGA´s. We show how OpenCL API´s are easily translated to hthreads, a hardware-based microkernel operating system to provide pthreads compliant run time services within the MPSoPC architecture.