Hardware and Software Synthesis of Heterogeneous Systems from Dataflow Programs

The new generation of multicore processors and reconfigurablehardware platforms provides a dramatic increase ofthe available parallelism and processing capabilities. However,one obstacle for exploiting all the promises of such platformsis deeply rooted in sequential thinking. The sequentialprogramming model does not naturally expose potentialparallelism that effectively permits to build parallel applicationsthat can be efficiently mapped on different kind of platforms.A shift of paradigm is necessary at all levels of applicationdevelopment to yield portable and scalable implementationson the widest range of heterogeneous platforms. Thispaper presents a design flow for the hardware and softwaresynthesis of heterogeneous systems allowing to automaticallygenerate hardware and software components as well as appropriateinterfaces, from a unique high-level descriptionof the application, based on the dataflow paradigm, runningonto heterogeneous architectures composed by reconfigurablehardware units and multicore processors. Experimental resultsbased on the implementation of several video coding algorithmsonto heterogeneous platforms are also provided toshow the effectiveness of the approach both in terms of portabilityand scalability