Extending component-based design with hardware components

Abstract

In order to cope with the increasing complexity of system design, component-based software engineering advocates the reuse and adaptation of existing software components. However, many applications particularly embedded systems consist of not only software, but also hardware components. Thus, component-based design should be extended to systems with both hardware and software components.Such an extension is not without challenges though. The extended methodology has to consider hard constraints on performance as well as dierent cost factors. Also, the dissimilarities between hardware and software (such as level of abstraction, communication primitives etc.) have to be resolved.In this paper, the authors propose such an extended component-based design methodology to include hardware components as well. This methodology allows the designer to work at a very high level of abstraction, where the focus is on functionality only. Non-functional constraints are specied in a declarative manner, and the mapping of components to hardware or software is determined automatically based on those constraints in the so-called hardware/software partitioning step.Moreover, a tool is presented supporting the new design methodology. Beside automating the partitioning process, this tool also checks the consistency between hardware and software implementations of a component.The authors also present a case study to demonstrate the applicability of the outlined concepts.

Performance Portability Across Heterogeneous SoCs Using a Generalized Library-Based Approach

“…In order to cope with the increasing complexity of system development, software engineering advocates build ing programs using existing software components [Heineman and Councill 2001;Oberleitner and Gschwind 2002]. In HW/SW codesign, the component-based design flow allows designers to work at a very high level of abstraction, and the wrapper or bridge component is proposed to construct a unified software interface around the hardware IP blocks [Cesário et al 2002;Arató et al 2005]. In this study, we use the notion of swappable components to help nonexpert programmers leverage existing accelerator libraries to achieve performance portability on heterogeneous SoC architectures.…”

“…The similar approach (called component-based design) is well studied in the HW/SW codesign area [Cesário et al 2002;Arató et al 2005;Cheung et al 2007]. The hardware IPs are wrapped as components in order to lift the work abstraction for designers, and the partitionable component is introduced to unify the interface of hardware and software components during the copartitioning phase.…”

“…The library consists of a collection of algorithms along with various implementations for different SoC components (multicore and accelerators such as GPU, DSP, FPGA, etc.). Each algorithm is presented to the programmer as a component-a concept borrowed from software engineering and HW/SW codesign [Cesário et al 2002;Arató et al 2005; Performance Portability Across Heterogeneous SoCs 21:3 Cheung et al 2007]-using wrapper code to enable the runtime to dynamically select the most appropriate implementation on the most appropriate accelerator within a given execution context.…”

A method for avoiding loops while decomposing the task description graph in system-level synthesis

“…In the typical applications, the TDG is decomposed into segments for distributing them onto different resources or to be processed by a pipelining tool. An example for distribution of the segments is the hardwaresoftware partitioning [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10], [11], [12]. Examples for pipelining can be found in [13], [14], [15], [16], [17].…”