A Platform Approach for Hardware/Software Co-Design with Support for RTOS-Based Systems

We propose a new flow for hardware/software co-design, based on the platform-based design, which forms a base for further automation attempts of the co-design process. We prove the applicability of the proposed flow on co-designing generic systems as well as RTOS-based systems. Our proposed flow starts with a software-only solution in which all system functionality is described as embedded software targeting a selected platform. Then, the flow iterates through co-verification, profiling, partitioning, and co-synthesis until the design criteria are met. We present four test cases to show the effectiveness of our proposed methodology. The main contribution added by the proposed methodology is incorporating the target application platform at the first stage of the flow then applying our iterative co-design algorithm without altering the main platform. This opposes other co-design methodologies that let the platform details be synthesized at later stages, widening the exploration space to be unrealistic and producing platforms that may vary to a large extent compared to the pre-verified application platform. The other contribution is the study provided on the effect of co-design on the behavior of RTOS-based platforms, which brings the flow closer to real-case problems, where most embedded systems utilize RTOS in their software stack.