Abstraction of RTL IPs into Embedded Software

High performance provided by multi-processor System-on-Chips (MPSoCs) often induces designers to choose customized processors to execute specific functions rather than using dedicated hardware. On the other hand, reuse of pre-designed and pre-verified IP cores is the key strategy to meet time-to-market while at the same time reducing the error risk during the development of MPSoC designs. In this context, it becomes convenient to translate an existent RTL IP description, originally dedicated to implement an HW component, into pure SW code (i.e., C/C++) to be executed by one or more processors of the MPSoC. This work proposes a methodology to automatically generate SW code by abstracting RTL IP models implemented in hardware description language (HDL). The methodology exploits an abstraction algorithm to eliminate many implementation details typical of the HW descriptions, in order to improve the performance of the generated code.