Device Driver and DMA Controller Synthesis from HW /SW Communication Protocol Specifications

We have separated the information requiredfor HW/SW interface synthesis into three parts,the protocol specification, the operating system related information,and the processor related information. From these inputs a synthesistool generates (a) device driver functions or (b) a combinationof device driver functions and a DMA controller, depending ona designer's decision. The clean separation of information facilitates(1) efficient design space exploration with combinations of differentprocessors, operating systems and protocols, and (2) maintaininga large number of different versions and variants of HW/SWinterfaces by synthesising them on demand. Protocols are specifiedas a grammar, which is fully independent of architecture andimplementation. From this the synthesis tool generates devicedriver code in C and/or synthesizable RTL codein VHDL for DMA controllers. After the initial selection of implementationalternatives the presented methods are fully automated. Its computationalcomplexity is quadratic in terms of the number of states. Withreal-life examples we show that the quality of the generatedcode is close to hand written quality in terms of performance,area and code size.

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