A Unified Hardware/Software MPSoC System Construction and Run-Time Framework

With the continual enhancement of heterogeneous resources in FPGA devices, utilizing these resources becomes a challenging burden for developers. Especially with the inclusion of sophisticated multiple processor system-on-chips, the necessary skill set to effectively leverage these resources spans both hardware and software expertise. The maturation of high level synthesis tools and programming languages aim to alleviate these complexities, yet there still exist systematic gaps that must be bridged to provide a more cohesive hardware/software development environment. High level MPSoC design initiatives such as Redsharc have reduced the costs of entry, simplifying application implementation. We propose a unified hardware/software framework for system construction, leveraging Redsharc's APIs, efficient on-chip interconnects, and run-time controllers. We present system level abstractions that enable compilation and implementation tools for hardware and software to be merged into a single configurable system development environment. Finally, we demonstrate our proposed framework with Redsharc, using AES encryption/decryption spanning software implementations on ARM and MicroBlaze processors and hardware kernels.