SOFTWARE ACCELERATION USING PROGRAMMABLE HARDWARE DEVICES

Traditionally the hardware and software subsystems for an application have been designed independently, and subsequently integrated during t he testing phase of the design cycle. In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in the design and implementation of embedded s ystems, where the constituent hardware and software subsystems are dev eloped concurrently to meet specified performance and cost constraints . This is known as hardware/software codesign. The paper presents a de velopment environment for the design, cosynthesis and performance eval uation of general purpose hardware/software systems. In particular, we are concerned with accelerating the performance of time critical regi ons of programs which are being executed on a conventional microcomput er. The behaviour of an application is defined by a C program and an i nteractive profiling tool helps identify these critical regions. The o riginal program is subsequently partitioned into hardware and software subsystems, where a critical region is now implemented using a progra mmable hardware device for improved performance. An overview of the de velopment process is presented and the significance of our approach is demonstrated in a number of examples.