Adaptation of partitioning and high-level synthesis in hardware/software co-synthesis

Previously, we had presented the system COSYMA for hardware/software co-synthesis of small embedded controllers. Target system of COSYMA is a core processor with application specific co-processors. The system speedup for standard programs compared to a single 33MHz RISC processor solution with fast, single cycle access RAM was typically less than 2 due to restrictions in high-level co-processor synthesis, and incorrectly estimated back end tool performance, such as hardware synthesis, compiler optimization and communication optimization. Meanwhile, a high-level synthesis tool for high-performance co-processors in co-synthesis has been developed. This paper explains the requirements and the main features of the high-level synthesis sytem and its integration into COSYMA. The results show a speedup of 10 in most cases. Compared to the speedup, the co-processor size is very small.