HW/SW specification using OOM techniques

The ever increasing complexity and networking of hardware/software (hw/sw) systems, together with tough competitiveness and shrinking time-to-market puts a heavy burden on system design methodologies. For rapid system prototyping, design productivity is mandatory. Due to ever decreasing product lifecycles, design reusability and upgrade is also a must. In this paper, a novel methodology for HW/SW co-design specification is proposed, together with a new CASHE tool that implements it. It is shown that object-oriented modeling (OOM) techniques can be rewardingly used both for product specification and design specification, leading to architectural solutions with different trade-offs. The new tool, PHS/sup ++/, allows static, dynamic and functional OO modeling of the problem and produces a VHDL description of solution architectures, synthesizable by the Synopsys commercial package. A design example is provided, to ascertain the usefulness of the proposed approach.