Synthesizing Concurrent Synchronous Computing Machines from Interrupt-Driven Binaries

Soft processors are increasingly being used to host embedded systems applications on reconfigurable computing platforms such as the field-programmable gate array (FPGA). Soft processors are sequential, synchronous devices that are not capable of exploiting the concurrency available on FPGAs. We present a method for automatically synthesizing interrupt-driven binaries into custom, self-contained, circuitizable finite-state machine with data path (FSMD) descriptions that are capable of leveraging the concurrency of the FPGA. We show how this method increases the computational density of interrupt-driven applications while decreasing interrupt servicing latencies, mitigating live lock, and eliminating overhead associated with interrupt context switching. We discuss implications and limitations of this method, and describe a prototype which implements the method for programs targeted for the Intel 8051.