SystemC and OCAPI-xl Based System-Level Design for Reconfigurable Systems-on-Chip

Reconfigurability is becoming an important part of System-on-Chip (SoC) design to cope with the increasing demands for simultaneous flexibility and computational power. Current hardware/software co-design methodologies provide little support for dealing with the additional design dimension introduced. Further support at the system-level is needed for the identification and modeling of dynamically re-configurable function blocks, for efficient design space exploration, partitioning and mapping, and for performance evaluation. The over-head effects, e.g. context switching and configuration data, should be included in the modeling already at the system-level in order to produce credible information for decision-making. This chapter focuses on hardware/software codesign applied for reconfigurable SoCs. We discuss exploration of additional requirements due to reconfigurability, report extensions to two C++ based languages/methodologies, SystemC and OCAPI-xl, to support those requirements, and present results of three case studies in the wireless and multimedia communication domain that were used for the validation of the approaches.