The authors present a novel method for developing recon®gurable systems targeted at embedded system applications. The paper shows how an existing object oriented design method (MOOSE) has been adapted to include recon®gurable hardware (FPGAs). Previous research on recon®gurable computing has concentrated on the ef®cient mapping of algorithms to FPGAs. It must be realised that recon®gurable hardware usually forms part of much larger embedded systems, which include other hardware components, memories, and processors executing signi®cant software tasks. The work represents a signi®cant advance over current embedded system design methods in that it integrates the use of recon®gurable hardware components with a systematic design method for complete systems including both hardware and software. The development techniques are illustrated by a practical example. Although the enhanced methodology is applicable to some recon®gurable computing systems, further work is planned to extend our design technique to exploit the potential bene®ts of embedded systems which can be dynamically recon®gured at system run-time. The ®nal objective is to produce an object oriented design methodology where system objects can be seamlessly implemented in either software or recon®gurable hardware.
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