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Communication between components, with different interface protocols, requires an extra component that must translate one protocol to another. This component is referred to as a transducer. In this paper we describe the design and implementation of a transducer between AMBA bus and TMS DSP bus. The transducer allows system designers to send data from AMBA compliant components to TMS compliant ones, and vice versa. The transducer was modeled in Verilog and implemented on Xilinx VirtexII FPGA board.

Abstract-This paper presents synthesis of Hardware Dependent Software (HdS) for multicore and many-core designs using Embedded System Environment (ESE). ESE is a tool set, developed at UC Irvine, for transaction level design of multicore embedded systems. HdS synthesis is a key component of ESE backend design flow. We follow a design process that starts with an application model consisting of C processes communicating via abstract message passing channels. The application model is mapped to a platform net-list of SW and HW cores, buses and buffers. A high speed transaction level model (TLM) is generated to validate abstract communication between processes mapped to different cores. The TLM is further refined into a Pin-Cycle Accurate Model (PCAM) for board implementation. The PCAM includes C code for all the HdS layers including routing, packeting, synchronization and bus transfer. The generated HdS methods provide a library of application level services to the C processes on individual SW cores. Therefore, the application developer does not need to write low level HdS for board implementation. Synthesis results for an multi-core MP3 decoder design, using ESE, show that the HdS is generated in order of seconds, compared to hours of manual coding. The quality of synthesized code is comparable to manually written code in terms of performance and code size.

This paper presents methods for automatic generation of synthesizable models of Transducer, a highly flexible communication module for interfacing multicore system components. We describe the transducer architecture, comprising the bus interface, high-level communication controllers and buffer management blocks. The well defined architecture and model semantics of the transducer enable its automatic generation. Moreover, the simple interface of the transducer provides for a well defined software interface, making it easy to update the software after changes in multicore system architecture. Our experimental results show that in multicore system design for large applications such as MP3 decoder and JPEG encoder, automatic transducer generation provides productivity gains of 9-23X due to significant savings in communication model development. On the quality axis, we show that multicore communication design using automatically generated transducers has only a 9% overhead in communication delay over a fullyconnected point-to-point communication architecture.