Rapid system prototyping, system modeling, and analysis in a hardware-software codesign environment

A hardware-software codesign environment provides the designer with an environment in which the designer can concurrently develop the hardware and software components of the system to satisfy a given set of performance and design constraints. As a design evolves from the conceptual level model of the hardware-software system, to the final implementation, the design progresses through a number of design steps and design environments. There exists a need for a single uniform design environment for specifying design information as it develops. In this paper, we describe our work to use VHDL to build design libraries that support rapid system prototyping and conceptual modeling as software components. Furthermore, the design libraries have been linked with a graphical codesign environment. This graphical environment provides a single framework in which the designer can (i) build the design, (ii) simulate the design for correctness, and (iii) visualize performance results and capacity measures.