Research On Techniques Of Hardware/Software Co-Synthesis And Virtual Microprocessor

Embedded system is an integration of hardware and software implementing some specialfunctions. In the traditional embedded system design method, the separation of haxdwareand software development result in 1ess efficient architecture a-nd delayed design process.The present design technology cannot satisfy the demand of embedded systems design.Hardware/software Codesign is a new design methodology; it is the integration ofspecification, synthesis and simulation of hardware and softWare with unified design tools.By using hardware/software codesign, the design cycle can be shortened and designefficiency can be improved. On the other hand, designers can choose hardware orsoftware implication method for system functions according the characteristic of functionand the design constraints, in order to achieve high performance, low cost designconfiguration.The thesis addresses the following key techniques in hardware/software codesign' Systemlevel behavior model, design evaluation, hardware/software co-synthesis and prototypingof embedded microprocessor.Aiming at the computation intensive embedded systems with fixed periodical constraint,the thesis presents a Timed Task GraPh (TTG) model, which making a good lbundation ofhardware/software co-synthesis and perfOrmance evaluation. In TTG model, task is thebase design granularity, the partition of task affect the quality of system design heavily.The thesis addresses the importance of the task partition problem and presents a taskpartition method based the closeness measurements of system behavior objec1fs.By analysis the instance of Complete-point and Bi-partition point, the thesis presents twomerge rules to improve the partition algorithm given by C. J. TSeng. The experimentsshow the pedition results improved notably by using the revised algorithm.The hardware/software co-synthesis determines the hardware and software a]location andfunction mapping. Hardware/Software co-synthesis is a key problem ofhardware/software codesign. The thesis presents a hardware/softWare co-synthesismethod based on the generic algorithLIn. Some improvements are made to enhance thegeneric algorithm's stability self adaPtability and optimization efficiency. Based on theTTG model, the co-synthesis method can map parallel task graphs to multiple processingunlts.Based on the comparison of existing performance evaluation methods and analysis of thecharacteristic of scheduling problem in hardware/software codesign, the thesis presents amsystem performance evaluation method based on "dynamic critical path first"heterogeneous multiprocessor schedule algorithm. Experiments show the schedulealgorithm is better than some other scheduling algorithms.Microprocessor is the heart of embedded systems, a multi-level, configurable,multi-functional prototyping tools ?VCPU for embedded microprocessors is presentedin the thesis.A design support environment is a necessary in order to support parallel design andcollaborative design. A codesign environment?YH-CDE is prsented in the thesis.YH-CDE is constructed on the CAD framework named YH-Bridge. Commercial designtools and self-development tools is integrated in YH-CDE. Using the co-simulation toolsof YH-CDE, designers can realize multi-level embedded system prototype.Finaly, the thesis summarizes our work and points out the next research dirction.The achievements of this paper have great theoretic and realistic significance tohardware/software codesign methodology and promote the application of codesigntechniques.