Codem: software/hardware codesign for embedded multicore systems supporting hardware services

摘要

Efficient software/hardware codesign is posing significant challenges to embedded systems. This paper proposes Codem, a software/hardware codesign flow for embedded systems, which models both processors and Intellectual Property (IP) cores as services. Tasks are regarded as abstract instructions which can be scheduled to IP cores for parallel execution automatically. In order to guide the hardware implementations of the hot spot functions, this paper incorporates a novel hot spot-based profiling technique to observe the hot spot functions while the application is being simulated. Furthermore, based on the hot spot of various applications, an adaptive mapping algorithm is presented to partition the application into multiple software/hardware tasks. We test the profiling-based design flow with classic Sort applications. Experimental results demonstrate that Codem can efficiently help researchers to identify the hot spots, and also outline a new direction to combine profiling techniques with state-of-the-art reconfigurable computing platforms for specific task acceleration.