Research On Hardware/Software Co-Design Methodology Of SoCs

With the development of embedded systems and microelectronics technologies, the integration level of hardware is higher and higher, which makes integrating CPU, memory and I/O devices into a single chip possible. SoC emerges as times require and becomes a mainstream design approach of embedded systems because of its high integration, high reliability and short time-to-market. The traditional methods cannot meet the particularities of SoC designs, which brings chances and challenges to the system designers. Therefore, the design methodology for SoCs has become a hot topic.Firstly, the tendency to design embedded systems is analyzed. The limitations of traditional methods and tools are discussed. According to the particularities of SoC designs, the flow of SoC hardware/software co-design method is researched. The tasks and aims of every development phase are determined, and the main problems that need solving preferentially in the SoC hardware/software co-design methodolgy are given. In consideration of "defeat one by one", performance evaluation, hardware/software co-synthesis, hardware/software co-verification and test scheduling for SoC designs are researched in depth, and a framework of SoC hardware/software co-design method is tried to build. Based on ideas above, the hardware/software co-design methodology for SoC designs is deeply, systematically researched in this dissertation, some main works and contributiveness including:1) To overcome the deficiency of the traditional hardware/software co-design methods and tools for embedded systems, the particularities of SoC designs based on reusable technologies are researched, difficulties in development are disscused as the reference to design SoCs, and a flow of SoC hardware/software co-design is proposed in this dissertation. A library of IP cores and software components is the foundation of this method. Reusable design technologies are put into every phase, such as partitioning, verification, development and test. The requirements of function and performance can be evaluted and verified before system realization, which avoids errors resulted by wrong designs, rectifies and eliminates errors as early as possible.2) To get high-quality SoC designs, the performance requirements of common embedded applications are analysed and the main index of performance for reusable SoC designs is...