Tosca: A Pragmatic Approach To Co-Design Automation Of Control-Dominated Systems

The level of interest in balancing the performance of customized hardware with the low cost and flexibility of software components is quickly growing in many application fields such as telecom, automotive and consumer electronics. In fact, for many applications requiring an ASIC approach, heterogeneous hardware/software architectures may provide a more effective design solution for some target performance/cost figures with respect to fully dedicated hardware implementations. Therefore, new design automation methodologies should be placed on top of current ASIC design flows in order to integrate dedicated logic obtained by register-transfer level synthesis with CPU core cells and the related software.