Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences

Hardware-software codesign, which implements a given specification with a set of system components such as ASICs and processors, includes several key tasks such as system component allocation, functional partitioning, quality metrics estimation, and model refinement. In this work, we focus on the model refinement task which transforms a specification from an original functional model to a refined implementation model. First, we categorize several commonly-used implementation models and describe a set of refinement procedures to transform a specification to each of these implementation models. We also present a set of experimental results to compare the implementation models and to demonstrate how the proposed approach can be used to explore different implementation styles.