Hardware-software co-synthesis of bus architecture embedded devices

Embedded systems permeate our society. Current estimates indicate that over 90 percent of worldwide computers are embedded systems. Embedded devices are found in the home, in medical instrumentation, air traffic control systems and more. Due to rapid advances in available technologies, the embedded systems of the future need to be designed using advanced tools that can help produce devices that meet performance, reliability and cost requirements. Hardware-software co-synthesis is the automatic generation of an embedded system's architecture. In this paper, we present an approach to hardware-software co-synthesis targeting bus architecture embedded systems. This approach employs exhaustive searching coupled with heuristic techniques while targeting multiple processor bus architecture pipelined heterogeneous systems. A substantive case study is provided demonstrating the tool's ability to analyze a variety of design trade-offs.