Design Automation for Embedded Systems 3, 149–161 (1998) c  1998 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Manufactured in The Netherlands. Rapid-Prototyping of Embedded Systems via Reprogrammable Devices STEFANO CARDELLI cardelli@venaria.marelli.it Magneti Marelli, Venaria (TO), Italy MASSIMILIANO CHIODO maxc@cadence.com PAOLO GIUSTO giusto@cadence.com Alta Group of Cadence Design Systems, Sunnyvale, CA ATTILA JURECSKA attila@synopsys.com Eagle Group of Synopsys, Beaverton, OR LUCIANO LAVAGNO lavagno@polito.it CLAUDIO SANSO ` E sansoe@polito.it Politecnico di Torino, Italy ALBERTO SANGIOVANNI-VINCENTELLI alberto@eecs.berkeley.edu University of California, Berkeley, CA Editor: Ahmed-Amine Jerraya Abstract. This paper describes a flexible board-level rapid-prototyping environment for embedded control ap- plications. The environment is based on an APTIX board populated by Xilinx FPGA devices, a 68HC11 emulator, and APTIX programmable interconnect devices. Given a design consisting of logic and of software running on a micro-controller that implement a set of tasks, the prototype is obtained by programming the FPGA devices, the micro-controller emulator and the APTIX devices. This environment being based on programmable devices offers the flexibility to perform engineering changes, the performance needed to validate complex systems and the hardware setup for field tests. The key point in our approach is the use of results of our previous research on software and hardware synthesis as well as of some commercial tools to provide the designer with fast program- ming data from a high-level description of the algorithms to be implemented. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach by showing a close-to real-life example from the automotive world. Keywords: embedded systems, rapid prototyping, hardware/software co-design, field-programmable inter- connect, software synthesis, automotive electronics 1. Introduction Embedded system designers are under more and more pressure to reduce design time often in presence of continuously changing specifications. To meet these challenges, the implemen- tation architecture is more and more based on programmable devices: micro-controllers, digital signal processors and Field Programmable Gate-Arrays. The development tools