Cosmos: An SDL Based Hardware/Software Codesign Environment

International audienceThe goal of this chapter is to introduce COSMOS, a methodology and an environment for the specification and synthesis of mixed systems composed of hardware (HW) and software (SW) starting from system level specifications. The application domain aimed at is communicating heterogeneous systems. The description model used permits an efficient manipulation of complex communication protocol. The resulting target is a mixed architecture that can be either a circuit, a card or a network of distributed processors. The current version of the COSMOS project provides a model for the representation of systems as well as basic primitives for synthesis at the system level. It allows a semi-automatic synthesis starting from system level specifications on an heterogeneous architecture. The ongoing work consists of a study and realisation of systematic partitioning strategies and efficient methods for the estimation and synthesis of communication. The principal choices of languages, representation models and architectures very much favour the design of telecommunication systems. COSMOS uses the SDL (ITU standard) language for the system specification. The result of partitioning and communication synthesis is an executable model of an heterogeneous architecture described in C (ANSI standard) and VHDL (IEEE standard) languages. The COSMOS environment is built around an intermediate format, called SOLAR, designed to facilitate the migration between systems specifications and hardware descriptions. SOLAR permits representation of high level concepts using the hardware semantics. The model is general containing an extended finite state machine and a powerful communication model