System modeling, hardware-software codesign, and mixed modeling with hardware description languages

Hardware Description Languages (HDL) such as VHDL provide a powerful platform for modeling at different levels of abstraction. Hardware-software codesign provides the designer with a design environment in which the designer can make effective partitioning decisions, and concurrently consider developing hardware and software components of a system, selected for the best possible performance, within a set of performance and design constraints. This paper describes our work to use VHDL to build design libraries that support rapid prototyping and conceptual modeling as software components in a hardware-software codesign environment. These library components can be instantiated for rapid prototyping, simulation, performance analysis of the design in the software domain, and for hybrid modeling containing interpreted and uninterpreted components. This helps in creating an uniformly robust design environment using a single HDL that supports the entire design cycle