Codesign methodology on programmable hardware and software system

Abstract

Software/hardware codesign have been well researched. Many codesign systems' targets are the application specific systems which use CPU core and its hardware peripherals. We expand this application specific codesign concept into the general purpose codesign concept. We propose the codesign system concept using a workstation as a general purpose hardware and a field programmable logic device (FPGA) as a program specific hardware. In our proposed system, FPGA behaves like a programmable hardware engine for target programs. The advantage of our codesign system is shown on the prototype system using an example for image processing.