I-Codesign: A Codesign Methodology for Reconfigurable Embedded Systems

Hardware/software codesign involves various design problems including system specification, design space exploration and hardware/software partitioning. An effective codesign process requires accurately predicting the performance, cost and power consequence of any design trade-off in algorithms or hardware characterization. In order to satisfy these design constraints we developed a new codesign methodology: I-codesign. It starts with describing the system specification with probabilistic estimations of the execution scenarios along with real-time and inclusion/exclusion parameters. Then, a three phase partitioning approach is applied to the specification where each phase deals with a specific set of constraints. An embedded controller code is generated at the end of the methodology that acts at run-time on the reconfiguration requests.