Back-End Enhancements FOR CAIRO University Hardware/Software Partitioning Tool (CUPSHOP

Abstract

Hardware/Software co-design has become one of the main methodologies in modern embedded systems. Good system design should strike a balance between the software flexibility and the hardware high performance. The HW/SW partitioning problem is complicated due to the very large search space possible. This complexity is further compounded by the availability of many alternatives for implementing the hardware part. The Cairo University PSo-based Hardware/sOftware Partitioning (CUPSHOP) tool was recently developed. This tool invokes the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) technique. It also models the hardware implementations of each component by two bounding extremes: the serial and the parallel implementations. In this thesis, several additions and enhancements of CUPSHOP are introduced. First, the pipelined alternative for hardware implementations is added due to its practical importance, high speed and low cost. Second, a new delay estimation formula is proposed for guiding the HW/SW partitioning problem. This formula enables accurate pre-scheduling delay estimation for each partitioning vector. Third, we developed an automatic VHDL code generation methodology for the hardware mapped components.