Automatic communication synthesis with hardware sharing for design space exploration

In this paper, we present a hardware sharing method for design space exploration of multiprocessor embedded systems. In our prior work, we had developed a system-level design tool which automatically synthesizes communications among the processes. In this work, we have extended our tool so that the tool can automatically synthesize communications which realize sharing of hardware among different processes. With the tool, designers only need to change the mapping information for hardware sharing. Designers therefore can easily explore wider design space with hardware sharing. A case study shows the effectiveness of our hardware sharing method.