EDA for hardware/software generation based on design space exploration.

In several application domains a set of well-known algorithms exists e.g. for encryption, hashing, multimedia encoding (mp3, mpeg, …) and image recognition. When implementing these algorithms in digital hardware (ASIC or FPGA), requirements such as performance, resource utilization (or occupied chip area) and power/energy consumption must be taken into account. This brings along a considerable amount of manual ad hoc work, putting a lot of strain on development time and non-recurring engineering cost. We solve this by building an EDA (Electronic Design Automation) tool that generates a hardware implementation of a given algorithm taking into account the non-functional requirements. The generic concept will be applied in several application domains. To obtain a competitive solution, application-specific knowledge and specialized low-level hardware libraries are used.