Interface synthesis using memory mapping for an FPGA platform

Several system-on-chip (SoC) platforms have recently emerged that use reconfigurable logic (FPGAs) as a programmable coprocessor to reduce the computational load on the main processor core. We present an interface synthesis approach that forms part of our hardware-software codesign methodology for such an FPGA-based platform. The approach is based on a novel memory mapping algorithm that maps data used by both the hardware and the software to shared memories on the reconfigurable fabric. The memory mapping algorithm couples with a high-level synthesis tool and uses scheduling information to map variables, arrays and complex data structures to the shared memories in a way that minimizes the number of registers and multiplexers used in the hardware interface. We also present three software schemes that enable the application software to communicate with this hardware interface. We demonstrate the utility of our approach and study the trade-offs involved using a case study of the codesign of a computationally expensive portion of the MPEG-1 multimedia application on to the Altera Nios platform.