SHIM: A Language for Hardware/Software Integration

Virtually every system designed today is an amalgam of hardware and software. Unfortunately, software and circuits that communicate across the hardware/software boundary are tedious and error-prone to create. This suggests a more automatic way to synthesize them. This paper presents the shim language, which combines imperative C-like semantics for software and rtl-like semantics for hardware to allow a unified description of hardware/software systems. Hardware processes and software functions communicate through shared variables, hardware for which is automatically synthesized by the shim compiler, which generates C and synthesizable vhdl. I demonstrate the effectiveness of the language by re-implementing an I2C bus controller. The shim source is half the size of an equivalent manual implementation, slightly faster, and has a smaller memory footprint. Partial and complete hardware implementations in shim are also presented, showing that shim is succinct and effective. Key words: Hardw...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: DAGSTUHL
• Authors: Stephen A. Edwards
• Keywords: DAGSTUHL 2004, DAGSTUHL 2007, Hardware, Imperative C-like Semantics, Shim Language