Synthesis and simulation of digital systems containing interacting hardware and software components

The authors consider software and interface synchronization schemes that facilitate communication between system components. They present tools to perform synthesis and simulation of a system description into hardware and software components. A program, Poseidon, is described that performs concurrent event-driven simulation of multiple functional modules implemented either as a program or as behavioral or structural hardware models. Input to Poseidon consists of description of interacting functional models with their respective clock cycle times and the interface synchronization scheme chosen by the partitioner. The resulting software component is assumed to be implemented for the DLX machine, a load/store microprocessor. Simulation examples and design of a graphics controller demonstrated the feasibility of mixed system synthesis