COMPOSE: A composite embedded software synthesis approach

Modern embedded software synthesis faces two distinct challenges. One one hand embedded software complexity continues to grow steadily, and at the same time they are often targeted to heterogeneous-MPSoC platforms, which are extremely difficult to program. Distinct families of tools have evolved, which specialize in tackling the specific issues associated to these two aspects of embedded software synthesis. However, in today´s competitive environment a complete design flow is needed, which can seamlessly transition a complex high level design to a multicore centric implementation. Integrated approaches suffer from added complexity and maintenance issues, for having to solve these two related but somewhat different problems simultaneously. This paper introduces a composite design technique - COMPOSE - that connects the existing high level modelling environments with multicore oriented software synthesis frameworks to handle this two-way challenge. The resulting design flow proves to be a superior alternative than both the existing integrated tools as well as the decoupled approaches, since it combines the respective strengths of both of these tool families without being unduly complex. Our experiments show that use of such a composite approach opens up new possibilities for high level performance optimization and can shorten the application development life cycle by upto 20%.