Abstract-Hardware/software partitioning is one of the key processes in a hardware/software cosynthesis system for digital signal processor cores. In hardware/software partitioning, area and delay estimation of a processor core plays an important role since the hardware/software partitioning process must determine which part of a processor core should be realized by hardware units and which part should be realized by a sequence of instructions based on execution time of an input application program and area of a synthesized processor core. This paper proposes area and delay estimation equations for digital signal processor cores. For area estimation, we show that total area for a processor core can be derived from the sum of area for a processor kernel and area for additional hardware units. Area for a processor kernel can be mainly obtained by minimum area for a processor kernel and overheads for adding hardware units and registers. Area for a hardware unit can be mainly obtained by its type and operation bit width. For delay estimation, we show that critical path delay for a processor core can be derived from the delay of a hardware unit which is on the critical path in the processor core. Experimental results demonstrate that errors of area estimation are less than 2% and errors of delay estimation are less than 2ns when comparing estimated area and delay with logic-synthesized area and delay.
In SoC designs, efficient communication between the hardware IPs and the on-chip processor becomes very important, however the interface is usually affacted by the processor core specification. Thus in this paper, we focus on developing an efficient interface circuit architecture for the communications between the on-chip processor and embedded hardware IP cores. we also propose a method to synthesize it. Experimental results show that our method could obtain optimal interface circuits and works well through designing a MPEG-4 encode application.
This paper proposes a new design methodology for SoCs reusing hardware IPs. In our approach, after system-level HW/SW partitioning, we use IPs for hardware parts, but synthesize a new processor core instead of reusing a processor core IP. System performs efficient parallel execution of hardware and software by taking account of a response time of hardware IP obtained by the proposed calculation algorithm. We can use optimal hardware IPs selected by the proposed hardware IPs selection algorithm. The experimental results show effectiveness of our new design methodology.
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