Systemc and OCAPI-XL Based System-Level Design for Reconfigurable Systems-on-Chip

Reconfigurability is becoming an important part of System-on-Chip (SoC) design to cope with the increasing demands for simultaneous flexibility and computational power. Current hardware/software co-design methodologies provide little support for dealing with the additional design dimension introduced. Further support at the system-level is needed for the identification and modeling of dynamically reconfigurable function blocks, for efficient design space exploration, partitioning and mapping, and for performance evaluation. The overhead effects, e.g. context switching and configuration data, should be included in the modeling already at the system-level in order to produce credible information for decision-making. This chapter focuses on hardware/software codesign applied for reconfigurable SoCs. We discuss exploration of additional requirements due to reconfigurability, report extensions to two C++ based languages/ methodologies, SystemC and OCAPI-xl, to support those requirements, and present results of three case studies in the wireless and multimedia communication domain that were used for the validation of the approaches.