A hardware/software co-design methodology for embedded telecommunication systems

Abstract

International audienceThe current paper presents an integrated co-design methodology for embedded telecommunication systems, starting from high-level system modelling down to system implementation. The proposed co-design methodology uses a system specification captured in UML language, translates at a simulatable SDL description used as input to the COSMOS toolset for the generation of a virtual hardware/software prototype. The system's partitioning is achieved interactively in a semi-automatic way, based on COSMOS and its underlying SOLAR format, producing C and VHDL descriptions for the implementation of software and hardware parts respectively. For the co-simulation, synthesis and system implementation parts of the proposed methodology, the CoWare tool has been employed using as front end the generated C and VHDL descriptions produced by COSMOS. The effectiveness of the proposed co-design approach is demonstrated through its application for the design and implementation of the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer and the RF I/F part of the Physical (PHY) layer of the DECT protocol stack