A design representation for hardware/software co-synthesis

This paper presents a design representation for digital designs consisting of both hardware and software components. The design representation is used to capture designs during the synthesis process from a high-level behavioural specification to its structural implementation. It is based on timed Petri nets which are used for representing the control flow. These are extended with a formal notation to capture data manipulation by both software and hardware. Based on the representation, a hardware/software co-design environment is being built, which includes procedures for design evaluation, hardware/software partitioning, and movement of functionality from hardware to software and vice versa