Software-Oriented Approach to Hardware-Software Co-Simulation for FPGA-Based Risc Extensible Processor

Recent advancements in mixed hardware-software modeling platforms have simplified the process of concurrently modeling complex algorithms in hardware while considering the software generation in an integrated environment. To efficiently facilitate design space exploration for RISC extensible processors, it is imperative to use a tightly coupled hardware-software co-design and modeling effort that also maintains the flexibility for exploring other types of microarchitectures. We have introduced a simulation framework using a software-oriented design methodology that can be adopted to model the software and hardware components in a reconfigurable co-processor. Experiments on some commonly used DSP and image processing tasks show that hardware-software trade-offs in the various models can be efficiently analyzed during the initial design phase.