Abstract
In traditional design methodologies, the system designer typically develops the application in a sequential paradigm almost to completion before addressing issues of parallelism and mapping to a heterogeneous architecture. As the architectural complexity of these applications increase, however, this process becomes too costly since implementation must be started anew after the design. The quality of the design also often suffers as a result. This is especially true for embedded applications, where the complexity lies within the system software and hardware architecture. We present a new methodology and toolset aimed at improving the system development process for high-performance embedded applications. The toolset provides a unified design representation from early design specification to integration—allowing for parallelism and synchronization specification in domain specific styles, and automating many process steps such as partitioning/mapping, simulation, glue-code generation, and performance analysis.