High-level development, modeling and automatic generation of hardware-dependent software

Abstract

With the increasing software content in modern embedded systems, software development clearly dominates the design cost. The development of Hardware-dependent Software (HdS) is especially challenging due to its tight coupling with the underlying hardware. Therefore, automatic generation of all embedded software including the HdS is highly desirable to meet today's shortened time-to-market demands. In this chapter, we describe a system-level design approach that offers a seamless solution for generating embedded software, starting from an abstract specification and going to an implementation. In our high-level development environment, the application is developed in a platform-agnostic format that hides most implementation detail. The target platform and the mapping of the application to the platform are described separately. A system compiler then automatically generates a system model at the transaction level for performance analysis and development. The same system model later serves as an input to a software generation process, which generates the final binaries for all processors in the system. These binaries include the application, device drivers, and operating system code. Using a design flow with automatic software generation offers significant productivity gains. At the same time, it allows the designer to focus on the algorithms without being burdened by implementation-level detail. © 2009 Springer Netherlands.