EPICURE: A partitioning and co-design framework for reconfigurable computing

摘要

This paper presents a new design methodology able to bridge the gap between an abstract specification and a heterogeneous reconfigurable architecture. The EPICURE contribution is the result of a joint study on abstraction/refinement methods and a smart reconfigurable architecture within the formal Esterel design tools suite. The original points of this work are: (ⅰ) a generic HW/SW interface model, (ⅱ) a specification methodology that handles the control, and includes efficient verification and HW/SW synthesis capabilities, (ⅲ) a method for parallelism exploration based on abstract resources/performance estimation expressed in terms of area/delay tradeoffs, (ⅳ) a HW/SW partitioning approach that refines the specification into explicit HW configurations and the associated SW control. The EPICURE framework shows how a cooperation of complementary methodologies and CAD tools associated with a relevant architecture can significantly improve the designer productivity, especially in the context of reconfigurable architectures.