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Hardware/Software Co-Design

Project Description

The main objective of this project is to develop methods and tools for the description, evaluation and partitioning of application-specific computer systems which consist of both hardware and software components. In particular, we have concentrated on the following problems which are considered as the key issues of hardware/software co-design.
  1. System architecture for mixed hardware/software implementations. Basic architectural models for hardware and software implementations have been formulated together with their interface.
  2. Unified design representation of hardware/software systems. We have developed a representation of digital systems which can be used both in the hardware synthesis and software compilation processes. Performance evaluation techniques are being developed based on the representation model.
  3. Algorithms and techniques for automatic partitioning of systems into hardware and software modules.
The results of the project have been applied to industrial designs especially in the areas of telecommunication. Ericsson CADLAB Research Center provides design examples and participates in the evaluation of the project results.

Project Members

Selected Publications

Petru Eles, Krzysztof Kuchcinski, Zebo Peng, Alexa Doboli, and Paul Pop: Scheduling of Conditional Process Graphs for the Synthesis of Embedded Systems, Proceedings of the Design Automation and Test in Europe Conference, Paris, February, 1998.

Petru Eles, Krzysztof Kuchcinski, Zebo Peng, Alexa Doboli, and Paul Pop: Process Scheduling for Performance Estimation and Synthesis of Embedded Systems, Research Report, Department of Computer and Information Science, Linköping University, 1997.

Petru Eles, Zebo Peng, Krzysztof Kuchcinski and Alexa Doboli: System Level Hardware/Software Partitioning Based on Simulated Annealing and Tabu Search, Journal on Design Automation for Embedded Systems, vol. 2, 5-32, 1997.

Petru Eles, Krzysztof Kuchcinski and Zebo Peng: Synthesis of Systems Specified as Interacting VHDL Processes, INTEGRATION, the VLSI journal, vol. 21, 113-138, 1996.

Petru Eles, Zebo Peng, Krzysztof Kuchcinski, and Alexa Doboli: Hardware/Software Partitioning with Iterative Improvement Heuristics, Proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on System Synthesis, San Diego, November, 1996.

Petru Eles, Zebo Peng, Krzysztof Kuchcinski & Alexa Doboli: Performance Guided System Level Hardware/Software Partitioning with Iterative Improvement Heuristics, Technical Report, , Dept. of Computer and Information Science, No. 26, 1995.

Erik Stoy & Zebo Peng: Inter-Domain Movement of Functionality as a Repartitioning Strategy for Hardware/Software Co-Design, Research Report, LiTH-IDA-R-95-33, Dept. of Computer and Information Science, Linköping University, 1995.
Also presented as a Short Note at the 21st Euromicro Conference: Design of Hardware/Software Systems, Como, Italy, 1995.

Erik Stoy & Zebo Peng: Hardware/Software Co-Simulation Using a Unified Design Representation, Proc. of The Sixth Swedish Workshop on Computer System Architecture, pp. 7-9, Stockholm, 1995.

Erik Stoy: A Petri Net Based Unified Representation for Hardware/Software Systems, Licentiate Thesis, LiU-Tek-Lic 1995:21, Linköping University, Sweden, 1995.

Petru Eles, Zebo Peng & Alexa Doboli: VHDL System-Level Specification and Partitioning in a Hardware/Software Co-Synthesis Environment, Proc. 3rd International Workshop on Hardware/Software Codesign, pp. 49-55, Grenoble, France, 1994.

Erik Stoy & Zebo Peng: An Integrated Modelling Technique for Hardware/Software Systems,
Proc. of IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems, ISCAS94, vol. 1, pp. 399-402, London, 1994.

Erik Stoy & Zebo Peng: A Design Representation for Hardware/Software Co-Synthesis, Proc. of Euromicro Conference on System Architecture and Integration, pp. 192-200, Liverpool, 1994.

Krzysztof Kuchcinski & Zebo Peng: An Integrated Design Methodology for Digital Systems, Presented at the Workshop on Design Methodologies for Microelectronics and Signal Processing, Cracow, Poland, 1993.
An extended version can be found as Research Report LiTH-IDA-R-93-31, Dept. of Computer and Information Science, Linköping University, Sweden.

Zebo Peng & Krzysztof Kuchcinski: An Algorithm for Partitioning of Application Specific Systems, Proc. European Conf. on Design Automation, EDAC93, pp. 316-321, Paris, 1993.

Zebo Peng, Johan Fagerström & Krzysztof Kuchcinski: A Unified Approach to Evaluation and Design of Hardware/Software Systems , Proc. Workshop on Software/Hardware CoDesign, 13th Int. Conf. on Software Engineering, Austin, Texas, 1991.