Hardware/Software Cosynthesis of DSP Systems [chapter]

Shuvra Bhattacharyya
2001 Signal Processing and Communications  
This chapter focuses on the automated mapping of high level specifications of DSP applications into implementation platforms that employ programmable DSPs. Since programmable DSPs are often used in conjunction with other types of programmable processors, such as microcontrollers and general-purpose microprocessors, and with various types of hardware modules, such as FPGAs, and ASIC circuitry, this mapping task, in general, is one of cosynthesis -the joint synthesis of both hardware and software
more » ... -for a heterogeneous multiprocessor. Since a large variety of cosynthesis techniques have been developed to date, it is not possible here to provide comprehensive coverage of the field. Instead, we focus on a subset of topics that are central to DSP-oriented cosynthesis -application modeling, hardware/software partitioning, synchronization optimization, and block-processing. Some important topics related to cosynthesis that are not covered here include memory management [1, 11, 26, 37, 53] , which is discussed in Chapter 10; DSP code generation from procedural language specifications [39] , which is the topic of Chapter 7; and performance analysis [36, 49, 54] . Additionally, we focus on synthesis from coarse-grain dataflow models due to the increasing importance of such modeling in DSP design tools, and the ability of such modeling to expose valuable, high-level structure of DSP applications that is difficult to deduce from within compilers for general purpose programming models, and other types of models. Thus, we do not explore techniques for fine-grain cosynthesis [21] , including synthesis of applicationspecific instruction processors (ASIPs) [43] , nor do we explore cosynthesis for control-dominant systems, such as those based on procedural language specifications [22] , communicating sequential processes [50] , and finite state machine models [6] . All of these are important directions within cosynthesis research, but they do not fit centrally within the DSP-oriented scope of this chapter. Motivation for coarse-grain dataflow specification stems from the growing trend towards specifying, analyzing, and verifying embedded system designs in terms of domain-specific concurrency models [33] , and the increasing use of In Y. H. Hu, editor, Programmable Digital Signal Processors:
doi:10.1201/9780203908068.ch8 fatcat:z2tvsup2f5adtehjabmyop6jpi