| Abstract: |
The paper treats the problem of automatic generation of communication interfaces between hardware devices such as FPGAs and ASICs and software (programmable) devices such as microprocessors.
In cite{ETT98b}, we introduced an object-oriented approach to interface generation starting from a coarse-grain process graph specification level to the final device-dependent implementation.
Here, we present generic templates of how to implement hardware/software interfaces, in particular in the scope of rapid prototyping environments that use reconfigurable hardware devices such as
FPGAs. The major concerns here are 1) efficiency of communication protocols (speed), 2) low implementation complexity (area), 3) synthesizability, and 4) low power dissipation. |
