Automatic Generation of Embedded Systems with .NET Framework Based Tools

The typical embedded system design flow has different shortcomings mainly because of the distinction between the hardware and software flows and the need to manually refine high-level specifications to low level descriptions to be implemented. We propose a methodology based on the .NET framework, where a high abstraction level specification is automatically refined to custom hardware block and a software executable. We demonstrate this methodology on an image processing application. It targets a FPGA-based system, composed of a soft-core Microblaze processor for the software, and reconfigurable logic for the hardware.