Development Environment for Dynamically Reconfigurable Embedded Systems

Reconfigurable computing is gaining wide acceptance as an enabling technology for many high-performance computing applications. Design and synthesis of dynamically reconfigurable systems however, pose a unique challenge to the design engineering process. A modelintegrated approach is proposed for design and synthesis of such systems. The modelintegrated approach defines a graphical design environment that directly supports domain specific modeling concepts. The environment captures system requirements, design information and alternatives, and the resources available for system implementation in the form of models. A model interpretation process generates hardware/software architecture specifications for the underlying runtime system, executable/synthesizable code, and a configuration manager for dynamic adaptation to changing environments while the synthesized system is on-line. The synthesis process optimizes hardware/software architectures for userdefinable cost functions such as latency, power, algorithmic accuracy and flexibility.