Principles of Hardware/Software Communication

Abstract

A hardware/software communications channel connects two parallel and heterogeneous entities, hardware and software. The design of such a channel introduces several interesting and challenging problems in computer design, and this chapter describes the underlying ideas of the solution. The first of these is synchronization, the structured interaction of parallel and independent entities. A second important discussion in this chapter is performance analysis of hardware/software communication links. This leads to the distinction of computation-constrained systems from communication-constrained systems. The final discussion is the distinction between loosely-coupled and tightly-coupled hardware-software interfaces.