Toward Unified Design of Hardware and Software Components Using ${\bf C} !+ ! +$

The increasing complexity of current embedded systems is pushing their design to higher levels of abstraction, leading to a convergence between hardware and software design methodologies. In this paper, we aim at narrowing the gap between hardware and software design by introducing a strategy that handles both domains in a unified fashion. We leverage on aspect-oriented programming and object-oriented programming techniques in order to provide unified C++ descriptions of embedded system components. Such unified descriptions can be obtained through a careful design process focused on isolating aspects that are specific to hardware and software scenarios. Aspects that differ significantly in each domain, such as resource allocation and communication, were isolated in aspect programs that are applied to the unified descriptions before they are compiled to software binaries or synthesized to dedicated hardware using high-level synthesis tools. Our results show that our strategy leads to reusable and flexible components at the cost of an acceptable overhead when compared to software-only C/ C++ and hardware-only C++ implementations.