Partitioning and CoDesign tools & methodology for Reconfigurable Computing: The EPICURE philosophy

As reconfigurable computing solutions are emerging at the hardware level, there is an obvious need for well adapted design tools. This paper describes a research effort currently in progress that tries to address this problem. The EPICURE framework is a new global methodology based on the cooperation of tools adapted for the design of embedded Hardware/Software reconfigurable solutions. Among the many problems in this field, the EPICURE projects focuses on the following: a/ A specification methodology that helps handling the system control and Hardware reconfiguration. b/ Exploration and estimation tools that address the parallelism and architecture exploration phase. c/ A Hardware/Software partitioning method based on a genetic algorithm which has the capability of handling the delay/area/power consumption trade-off. d/ A dedicated interface model (hardware and software) that abstracts the communication in between a standard processor and a reconfigurable device.