Optimizing HW/SW codesign towards reliability for critical-application systems

This work presents an innovative approach for hardware/software codesign of safety-critical computing systems. The proposed approach is based on system reliability requirements to decide which parts of the system are partitioned into hardware or software. The approach considers as input a complete software description of the design. In our case, we use as the initial description the C language and then, for those parts compiled to hardware, the Handel-C language is applied. After partitioning, we verify system reliability based on an adaptation of the weak mutation analysis technique. This technique was originally proposed for software testing by means of verifying the adequacy of a test vector set for a given program. We also present a case study in order to illustrate the proposed approach.