Domain-Specific Language for HW/SW Co-design for FPGAs

This article describes FSMLanguage, a domain-specific language for HW/SW co-design targeting platform FPGAs. Modern platform FPGAs provide a wealth of configurable logic in addition to embedded processors, distributed RAM blocks, and DSP slices in order to help facilitate building HW/SW co-designed systems. A technical challenge in building such systems is that the practice of designing software and hardware requires different areas of expertise

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different description domains, i.e. languages and vocabulary. FSMLanguage attempts to unify these domains by defining a way to describe HW/SW co-designed systems in terms of sets of finite-state machines – a concept that is reasonably familiar to both software programmers and hardware designers. FSMLanguage is a domain-specific language for describing the functionality of a finite-state machine in such a way that its implementation can be re-targeted to software or hardware in an efficient manner. The efficiency is achieved by exploiting the resources found within modern platform FPGAs – namely the distributed RAM blocks, soft-core processors, and the ability to construct dedicated communication channels between FSMs in the reconfigurable fabric. The language and its compiler promote uniformity in the description of a HW/SW co-designed system, which allows a system designer to make partitioning and implementation strategy decisions later in the design cycle.