Synthesis of DMA controllers from architecture independent descriptions of HW/SW communication protocols

Starting from an architecture and implementation independent specification of hardware/software communication protocols, we present a protocol synthesis method that generates a mixed hardware and software implementation. For the hardware part, the synthesis method will generate an application specific direct memory access (DMA) controller for each protocol specification. Software parts of the generated implementation are components for initialization, synchronization and communication with the DMA controller. The protocol specification, with the grammar-based language ProGram, is used to model the HW/SW communication protocol. Since this approach is based on a device driver synthesis system for software solutions, which adopts the generated device drivers to a selected processor and kernel, the generated hardware/software solutions can also be adopted to any processor and OS kernel. This lets the designer explore the design space for the communication protocols by trading off between performance and cost.