Hardware and software prototyping for application-specific real-time systems

Dedicated systems with hardware and software tailored for the application provide tremendous performance improvements over systems based on general-purpose hardware. The authors describe SIERA, a system being developed for rapid-prototyping of the hardware and software components of such dedicated real-time systems starting from a high-level description. Based on their experience of automated generation at the chip level which they developed with the LAGER system, they identify two distinct phases in the design process. The first is the process of mapping the high-level system specification to a set of interacting hardware and software modules. The second is the generation of these software and hardware modules. A mix of mapping, synthesis and library based techniques is being utilized to accomplish these tasks