October 14, 2010 -- The growing complexity of hardware architectures to meet the increasing performance requirements of the system applications reveals new programming problems, in particular when we aim to use a same hardware platform for different applications. Nowadays, in addition to several general purpose processors, a system-on-chip may consist of a set of configurable IP components, connected by a network-on-chip (NoC). Programming such an architecture needs to define a set of different, but absolutely dependent, configuration codes. This definition makes very difficult the setting up of the generic generation flow of HW/SW interfaces, i.e. the adapters enabling an application to run on a given architecture.

In this article, we present a code generation flow to deploy system applications over hardware architectures based on abstract descriptions. Our approach is defined in two steps: a front-end step which deals with abstract description of the application, the architecture (in extended IP-XACT), the mapping, and a back-end step which incorporates specific platform details necessary for HW/SW interface generation. A case study on the deployment of a complex 4G telecommunication application on a heterogeneous multi-core platform is also presented.

By Amin El Mrabti, Frederic Rousseau, Hamed Sheibanyrad, Frederic Petrot, Romain Lemaire, Jerome Martin, Emmanuel Vaumorin, and Maxime Palus. (El Mrabti, Rousseau, Sheibanyrad, and Petrot are with TIMA Laboratory; Lemaire and Martin are with CEA, LETI; Vaumorin and Palus are with Magillem Design Services.)