Automatic Generation of Hybrid Hw/Sw Applications by means of COTS Component Integration

The great advances achieved in the field of electronic engineering have given rise to new hybrid systems which combine the higher flexibility of software (Sw) with the better performance of hardware (Hw). In this paper we present a novel approach to the design and implementation of this kind of hybrid systems which covers their whole development life-cycle. This proposal integrates two of the currently most popular software development paradigms: component-based software engineering and automatic software generation. Although this paper presents the results of applying this new approach to the specific domain of Visual Information Processing Systems (VIPS), it can be easily extended to cover different domains such as control applications or telecommunication systems. As a part of this work a new visual programming tool called IP-CoDER has been developed which allows incrementally building new VIPS from the design and partitioning of functional prototypes to the automatic generation of the final Hw/Sw hybrid system.