OOM approach for HW/SW co-analysis, specification and design of heterogeneous systems

The ever increasing complexity and networking of hardware/software (hw/sw) electronic systems, eventually with information systems, together with tough competitiveness and shrinking time-to-market puts a heavy burden on system design methodologies. In this paper, a novel methodology for hw/sw co-analysis, specification and design is introduced, together with a new CASHE tool that implements it. It is shown that object-oriented modeling (OOM) is a useful approach to characterize first the problem domain, then possible solutions, analysing different architectural solutions according to product specifications and other design trade-offs. The new tool, PHS ++ , using the static, dynamic and functional OO model, delivers a VHDL description of the suggested architecture, synthesizable (for the hardware part) by the Synopsys commercial package. Briefly, a design example is provided, to ascertain the usefulness of the proposed approach.