Flexible Application Software Generation for Heterogeneous Multi-Processor System-on-Chip

Multimedia applications require heterogeneous multiprocessor architectures with specific I/O components in order to achieve computation and communication performances. The different processors run different software stacks, which are composed by the application s tasks and a hardware dependent software (HDS). The HDS contains an operating system, a specific communication library and a hardware abstraction layer (HAL), granting accesses to hardware resources. Building these software stacks may be the trouble maker of the MP-SoC design process when trying to reduce its time-to-market. In this paper, we present our application software generation flow and tools starting from a high level application model. They are able to handle heterogeneous MP-SoC, running multiple software stacks while using different operating systems and communication models. The application software generation tool builds the application s sofware stacks by producing optimized and multi-tasked C code and using a flexible operating system and communication programming interfaces management. In order to validate the effectiveness of our approach, we generated the software stacks of a Motion JPEG decoder, partitioned and mapped on an off-the-shelf multimedia platform.