HARDWARE SOFTWARE CO-DESIGN WITH THE HMS FRAMEWORK/

Hardware/Software co-design is an increasingly common design style for integrated circuits. It allows the majority of a system to designed q uickly with standardized parts, while special purpose hardware is used for the time critical portions of the system. The framework considere d in this paper performs Hardware/Multi-Software (HMS) co-design for i terative loops, given an input specification that includes the system to be built, the number of available processors, the total chip area, and the required response time. Originally, all operations are done in software. The system then substitutes hardware (adder, multiplier, bu s) for software based on the needability of each type of hardware unit . After a new hardware unit is introduced the system is rescheduled us ing a variation of rotation scheduling in which operations may be move d between processors. Experimental results are shown that illustrate t he efficiency of the algorithms as well as the savings achieved.