Seamless integration of HW/SW components in a HLS-based SoC design environment

With system-on-chip (SoC) designs growing in complexity, system-level approaches that leverage on high-level synthesis (HLS) techniques are becoming the workhorse of current SoC design flows. In this scenario, we propose a component communication framework that allows for the seamless integration of hardware and software components in a HLS-capable environment. The proposed infrastructure relies on C++ static metaprogramming techniques to efficiently abstract communication details in high-level C++ implementations of components. We show how these mechanisms can be integrated with virtual platforms at different levels of abstraction, resulting in a design flow that enables the rapid design space exploration of SoC designs.