Rapid prototyping of dataflow programs on hardware/software architectures

In this paper, the problem of automatically mapping large-grain dataflow programs onto heterogeneous hardware/software architectures is treated. Starting with a given hardware/software partition, interfaces are inserted into the specification to account for communication, in particular across hardware/software boundaries. Depending on the target architecture, the interfaces are refined according to given communication constraints (bus protocols, memory mapping, interrupts, DMA, etc.). A framework is described that uses an object-oriented approach to transform a given dataflow graph and to generate code for the actors as well as for the interfaces. The object-orientation enables an easy migration (retargeting) of typical communication primitives to other target architectures.