The Software and Hardware Integration Linker for Reconfigurable Embedded System

Accelerators are used to speed up demanding computational applications. However, designers find integrating hardware and software communications interface being a challenge. In this paper, the integration methods for computing in reconfigurable embedded systems are explored. Through integration linker, hardware net-list files, tasks, and initial file will be combined into one execution file, which can execute in the proposed reconfigurable platforms. Tasks and hardware functions are segregated by program segment prefixes, designed to record interaction information of hardware and software resources. When the executor operates on the target embedded environment, the implicit hardwire-function call will be used to invoke hardware functions by hardware management unit bridging in the task codes. The integrating methodology has been implemented in the co-design platform, and this work verifies communication effectiveness between hardware and software through video compression applications.