An Efficient Performance-Driven Approach for HW/SW Co-Design

Abstract

Nowadays embedded systems are powerful and everywhere. They implement complex functionality relying on a huge set of different hardware and software (HW/SW) architectures. In order to reduce their development effort, HW/SW Co-Design techniques are used during the entire development cycle. These techniques aim at helping designers to define a feasible hardware and software partitioning for the system in such a way that functional and non-functional requirements are fulfilled. In this context Design Space Exploration is a challenging activity since a huge number of different implementation alternatives need to be evaluated.