High-Level Estimation Techniques for Usage in Hardware/Software Co-Design

Jörg Henkel, Rolf Ernst

Abstract: High-level estimation techniques are of paramount importance for design decisions like hardware/software partitioning or design space explorations. In both cases an appropriate compromise between accuracy and computation time determines about the feasibility of those estimation techniques. In this paper we present high-level estimation techniques for hardware effort and hardware/software communication time. Our techniques deliver fast results at sufficient accuracy. Furthermore, it is shown in which way these techniques are applied in order to cope with contradictory design goals like performance constraints and hardware effort constraints. As a solution, we present a cost function for the purpose of hardware/software partitioning that offers a dynamic weighting of its components. The conducted experiments show that the usage of our estimation techniques in conjunction with their efficient combination leads to reasonable hardware/software implementations as opposed to approaches that consider single constraints only.