Practical Introduction to Hardware/Software Codesign (eBook)

This book provides a systematic introduction to the topic of Hardware-Software Codesign. The material emphasizes the basic ideas, and the practical aspects of Hardware-Software Codesign. The book developed from a course on the topic of Hardware-Software Codesign, organized by the author at Virginia Tech. It is separated into four differenct sections; Basic Concepts, Custom Architectures, Hardware/Software Interfaces, and Applications.

The author covers many concepts including the various forms of expressing computations, sequential and parallel implementations, control-flow and data-flow, control dependency and data dependency, latency and throughput as well as the architecture design space of hardware data paths, finite state machines, micro-programmed machines, instruction-set processors, system-on-chip, and on-chip buses. The material also includes the different forms of hardware/software interfaces, their impact on performance, hardware cost, and software complexity. The book contains information on hardware/software integration of components on top of hardware/software interfaces as well as design methodology and design flows for hardware-software codesign including performance evaluation, verification and synthesis of hardware and software implementations. Problems are included at the end of each chapter and a solutions manual will be available for instructors.

Patrick Schaumont is Assistant Professor in Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech. He received the
PhD degree in Electrical Engineering from UCLA (2004), and the MS degree in Computer Science from
Rijksuniversiteit Ghent, Belgium (1990). He has been a researcher at the Inter-university Micro-
Electronics Center (IMEC) in Belgium from 1992 to 2001. He has served on the program committee of
international conferences in this field such as CHES, DATE, DAC, IEEE HOST and IEEE MEMOCODE.

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This is a practical book for computer engineers who want to understand or implement hardware/software systems. It focuses on problems that require one to combine hardware design with software design - such problems can be solved with hardware/software codesign. When used properly, hardware/software co- sign works better than hardware design or software design alone: it can improve the overall performance of digital systems, and it can shorten their design time. Hardware/software codesign can help a designer to make trade-offs between the ?exibility and the performanceof a digital system. To achieve this, a designer needs to combine two radically different ways of design: the sequential way of dec- position in time, using software, with the parallel way of decomposition in space, using hardware. Intended Audience This book assumes that you have a basic understandingof hardware that you are - miliar with standard digital hardware componentssuch as registers, logic gates, and components such as multiplexers and arithmetic operators. The book also assumes that you know how to write a program in C. These topics are usually covered in an introductory course on computer engineering or in a combination of courses on digital design and software engineering.