An Architecture Design and Assessment System for Software/Hardware Codesign

Codesign of hardware and software for high performance signal processing systems is important if the potential benefits of VLSI are to be realized. This article describes a CAD system developed to support the codesign of hardware and software architectures for high performance digital signal processors which is based on a directed graph methodology. A comprehensive example is developed to demonstrate the use of the system, the fundamentals of the modeling and analysis methodology are discussed, and an overview of the tools in the system is presented along with a discussion of the enhancements currently being developed.