PROXIMITY-BASED CLUSTER ALLOCATION FOR HARDWARE-SOFTWARE CO-SYNTHESIS OF HETEROGENEOUS DISTRIBUTED EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

Hardware-software co-synthesis is the process of portioning an embedded system specification into hardware and software modules to meet performance, power, and cost goals. Embedded systems are generally specified in terms of a set of acyclic task graphs. According to one embodiment of the present invention, a co-synthesis algorithm, called COSYN, starts periodic task graphs with real-time constraints and produces a low-cost heterogeneous distributed embedded system architecture meeting these constraints. In the present invention, clusters are selected for allocation during a synthesis phase using both priority levels and costs of communication for the clusters. In another embodiment, a power distribution architecture (PDA) derivation phase, following the synthesis phase, automatically derives a PDA for the embedded system, wherein the PDA defines power supply capacity and interconnection of any necessary power converters to meet power requirements of the embedded system.