As time spent on design becomes an increasingly significant fraction of the cost of digital system design, concurrent hardware and software development through codesign becomes increasingly important. Also, emerging field programmable logic technologies permit digital system codesigners to easily migrate system functionality between software and hardware during the design process. Yet few codesign tools exist currently, and among those there is often an inverse relation between usability and functionality. They lack interfaces that fit with designers' ways of working, or they do not integrate with existing frameworks for chip and program development. We propose to recruit five students from Spelman College, Jackson State University, and Tuskegee University, all Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), and provide them with support, mentoring, and advising as they pursue courses of study leasing to the PhD degree in Computer Science and Engineering at Auburn University, investigating topics in hardware-software codesign interface and tool development. We can significantly increase not only the supply of codesign specialists but also the nation's supply of African American computer scientists by guiding students in investigations of topics in hardware-software codesign tool and interface development: language development, graphical user interfaces, algorithms for automatic migration of functionality, inter-tool frameworks, and formal methods for codesign.
