Rapid-prototyping of hardware and software in a unified framework

The authors present a CAD (computer-aided design) framework for design of application-specific systems that use a mix of dedicated hardware modules and software processes running on programmable hardware modules. Many application-specific systems are actually being designed using this framework. Some are using the entire top-down mixed hardware-software architecture template based methodology, whereas others are fruitfully employing just the board-level module generators and libraries for specific custom boards. The main contribution of this work is the handling of board-level module generation, system software generation, and hardware-software integration in a unified framework. The application area addressed is that of systems that interact with their environment in real-time; a robot control system and a speech recognition system are examples of such systems.<>