The Chinook hardware/software co-synthesis system
Pai H. Chou, Ross B. Ortega, Gaetano Borriello · 1995
Designers of embedded systems are facing ever tighter constraints on design time. Unfortunately, tools today do not provide the right kind of help in the partitioning and mapping of a design onto hardware and software components. The Chinook co-synthesis system is an attempt to provide such a tool for control-dominated embedded system designs. It addresses the automation of the most time-consuming and error-prone tasks in embedded controller design, namely: the synthesis of interface hardware and software needed to integrate system components; the migration of functions between processors or custom logic; and the co-simulation of the design before and after synthesis. This paper describes the principal elements of Chinook and discusses its application to a variety of embedded designs. The Chinook Hardware/Software Co-Synthesis System 1 camera out digitizer in out IR recv in out scaler in out decomp in out compress in out IR xmit in out Figure 1: The infrared video-wristwatch system. The camera unit transmits compressed video packets to a wrist-watch display. 1