Automated Inference of SoC Configuration through Firmware Source Code Analysis

Building application specific systems-on-chip requires several coordinated steps. A hardware configuration must be specified, the corresponding system must be synthesized and finally, the software part of the application must be implemented. Traditionally, development was executed in exactly this order. Specifying the hardware configuration can be a time consuming task, since it is often executed with the help of graphical tools. Experienced users can reverse the process, by first writing the software and then inferring the required hardware components of the system. In this contribution, we present a tool that enables this style of working. We evaluate the functionality of our tool with the help of several existing examples and we evaluate the gain in productivity by comparing the time required for the generation of two different systems. We show that our tool is successful for all examples and that it requires considerable less time.