Program slicing for codesign

Program slicing is a software analysis technique that computes the set of operations in a program that may affect the computation at a particular operation. Interprocedural slicing techniques have separately addressed concurrent programs and hardware description languages. However, application of slicing to codesign of embedded systems requires dependence analysis across the hardware-software interface. We extend program slicing for a codesign environment. Hardware-software interactions common in component-based systems are mapped to previously introduced dependences, including the interference and signal dependences. We introduce a novel access dependence that models a memory access side effect that results in activation of a process. A slicing algorithm that incorporates this variety of dependences is described.