Synthesis of object-oriented descriptions modeled at functional-level
Maziar Goudarzi, Shaahin Hessabi · 2003
In this paper we present a novel approach to synthesizing polymorphic hardware from functional-level Object-Oriented (OO) models. Our proposed target architecture is intended to be subsequently used in co-design of hardware and software from a single OO source model, and hence, in order to be consistent with software compilers uses a global memory to store the objects data. The target architecture enables inheritance and polymorphism; it consists of a method-invocation unit (MIU), a functional unit (FU) per class method, and an object-management unit (OMU). The MIU, FU, and OMU functionalities are presented, along with the details of modeling and synthesis of a traffic-light controller to demonstrate the concepts and approach. Moreover, experimental results of modeling and implementing some case studies are presented and analyzed. Synthesis results show some area overhead compared to traditional methodologies; however, we show that this overhead is constant for all applications having the same class hierarchy and moreover is independent of the number of objects in the system. Therefore this overhead is ignorable, or even not present, for large designs or designs with several objects where OO shows its best.