A Novel Hardware/Software Codesign Methodology Based on Dynamic Reconfiguration with Impulse C and Codeveloper

The design of embedded systems has rapidly changed during the last decade. It is possible to identify two main responsible factors: hardware/software codesign and dynamic reconfiguration. The work presented in this paper tries to investigate how to consider the reconfiguration as an explicit dimension in the design flow for embedded systems. This work addresses the challenge introduced by the partial dynamic reconfiguration trying to propose a novel design flow, using the CoDeveloper framework to speedup the design process. The proposed flow allows the designer to define his/her desired specification using an high level design language such as C. Finally, it provides results showing how the proposed flow can be used by the designer to have more information useful in making the correct decisions during the design of his/her embedded system.