THE COSYMA ENVIRONMENT FOR HARDWARE SOFTWARE COSYNTHESIS OF SMALL EMBEDDED SYSTEMS/

COSYMA is a platform for the investigation of hardware/software cosynt hesis of small embedded systems. Target architecture is currently limi ted to processor-coprocessor configurations executing a single process or a system of communicating processes which are statically scheduled . Many aspects of cosynthesis such as automatic hardware/software part itioning, efficient hardware/software communication, timing and hardwa re overhead estimation and analysis, interdependence of different cosy nthesis phases, data representation, etc., can successfully be investi gated in this manageable domain. COSYMA covers the complete design flo w from an input language similar to C down to netlist and object code. Current focus is on high performance data dominated systems, but firs t steps to incorporate control dominated subtasks can be presented. Us ing a specific high-level synthesis tool, the results show a considera ble speedup of the resulting processor-coprocessor system even compare d to modern RISC processors which is typically limited by memory bandw idth.