Software-oriented approach to hardware-software co-simulation for an FPGA-based RISC extensible processor

Abstract

Innovative embedded applications like video and internet streaming in the multimedia domain have greatly increased the computational workload of embedded systems in consumer products. To meet such demands, reconfigurable platforms are seen as a compromise to bridge the gap between hardware-based and software-based implementations and can deliver better flexibility while maintaining performance for different types of applications. Such reconfigurable systems present a difficult problem for current modeling platforms as a tightly-coupled co design/simulation effort for both hardware and software must be integrated in the framework.