A reconfigurable platform for development of embedded systems

Quality, functionality and time-to-market are key indices for a competitive and successful embedded system product. A good way to reduce the time to market is to make use of reusable software models and reconfigurable hardware platform. This paper introduces a reconfigurable platform, which is now being done for methodology research on rapid development of embedded systems. The effective design method and efficient implementation technology are formal reuse and reconfiguration. The reusability consideration is mainly the reuse frequency and the abstraction level of the application system, while the reconfigurability consideration mainly includes reconfiguration of function/architecture, hardware/software and interfaces. In view of these considerations, the paper describes three possibly reconfigurable architectures like DSP-FPGA, MCU-FPGA and DSP-MCU-FPGA architectures. To get these architectures, we can use reconfigurable data-path units and library-based interfaces. In terms of benefits, the paper not only introduces knowledge achieved from development of this platform, but also demonstrates how to use the platform to construct an orthogonal IP space for development of virtual IPs and virtual components.