Hardware/software co-design environment for hierarchical platform-based design

To facilitate the design of SoC (System-on-a-Chip), we present a hardware/software co-design environment called HSCDE. In this paper, some critical techniques related to HSCDE are revealed, including Platform-Based SoC modeling technology and ant algorithm based hardware/software partitioning technology. HSCDE environment divides SoC hardware/software co-design processes into three design levels, and it also supports the mappings among these design levels by two design mapping processes. Experimental results show that HSCDE effectively supports hierarchical Platform-Based SoC hardware/software co-design methodology, and further statistics reveal that an average of 10%similar to 25% revisions on platform templates are required to get a new SoC design.