High Level Hardware/Software Embedded System Design with Redsharc

Abstract: As tools for designing multiple processor systems-on-chips (MPSoCs) continue to evolve to meet the demands of developers, there exist systematic gaps that must be bridged to provide a more cohesive hardware/software development environment. We present Redsharc to address these problems and enable: system generation, software/hardware compilation and synthesis, run-time control and execution of MPSoCs. The efforts presented in this paper extend our previous work to provide a rich API, build infrastructure, and runtime enabling developers to design a system of simultaneously executing kernels in software or hardware, that communicate seamlessly. In this work we take Redsharc further to support a broader class of applications across a larger number of devices requiring a more unified system development environment and build infrastructure. To accomplish this we leverage existing tools and extend Redsharc with build and control infrastructure to relieve the burden of system development allowing software programmers to focus their efforts on application and kernel development.