System Level Specification and Software Synthesis of Multimedia Embedded Systems: PeaCE Approach

Abstract

In this paper we present a hardware/software codesign flow in which embedded software code is automatically generated from system level specification of multitasking multimedia embedded system, both for simulation and implementation. In the proposed system design methodology, the system behavior is specified with a heterogeneous mixture of formal models of computation: a dataflow model to specify the internal behavior of a signal processing task, an FSM model to specify a control task. At the top level, we introduce a novel task-level specification model to represent diverse task execution semantics and communication protocols. The generated software has a layered structure using virtual OS APIs and OS wrapper implementations to make it reconfigurable for multiple target platforms. Experiments with a Divx player example prove the viability of the proposed technique.