A Hardware/Software Partitioning and Scheduling Approach for Embedded Systems with Low-Power and High Performance Requirements

摘要

Hardware/software (hw/sw) partitioning largely affects the system cost, performance, and power consumption. Most of the previous hw/sw partitioning approaches are focused on either optimising the hw area, or the performance. Thus, they ignore the influence of the partitioning process on the energy consumption. However, during this process the designer still has the maximum flexibility, hence, it is clearly the best moment to analyse the energy consumption. We have developed a new hw/sw partitioning and scheduling tool that reduces the energy consumption of an embedded system while meeting high performance constraints. We have applied it to two current multimedia applications saving up to 30% of the system energy without reducing the performance.