1 / 13

Overview of HW/SW Co-Design (Chapter 1, The CoDesign Book)

This chapter provides an introduction to the concept of hardware/software co-design, discussing its definition, nature, and the factors that drive its implementation. It also compares the performance and energy efficiency of hardware and software in system design.

fries
Download Presentation

Overview of HW/SW Co-Design (Chapter 1, The CoDesign Book)

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Overview of HW/SW Co-Design(Chapter 1, The CoDesignBook) HaoZheng Comp Sci & Eng U of South Florida

  2. Hardware/Software Co-Design HW/SW co-design means meeting system level objectives by exploiting the synergy of HW and SW through concurrent design. Definition: HW/SW co-design is the design of cooperating HW components and SW components in a single design effort. Alternative definition:

  3. HW: Characterization • A single-clock synchronous digital circuit. • Or an equivalent cycle-accurate model • A simplified view • Events within a clock cycle cannot be captured.

  4. SW: Characterization • A single-thread sequential program • In C or assembly languages. • C programs are useful to describe computations.

  5. HW and SW in a System Design HW/SW co-design is the partitioning and design of an application in terms of fixed and flexible components.

  6. Natures of HW & SW To implement an application: choose HW or SW?

  7. Compare HW & SW: Performance CoDesignbook

  8. Compare HW & SW: Performance • HW implementation (ASIC) has higher performance over SW running on processors. • However, processors may have a much higher clock frequency. • the speed advantage of ASICs over software is not clear. • Therefore, absolute performance is not a very good metric to compare hardware and software

  9. Compare HW & SW: Energy Efficency the energy consumption of an AES engine (encryption) on different archi- tectures. Energy efficiency: the amount of useful work done per unit of energy

  10. Compare HW & SW: Summary • There is a large overhead associated with executing software instructions in the processor implementation • Instruction and operand fetch from memory • Complex state machine for control of the datapath, etc. • Flexibility comes with a significant energy cost • One which energy optimized applications cannot tolerate • Therefore, you will never find a Pentium processor in a cell phone! • Specialized hardware architectures are usually also more efficient than software from a relative perspective. • Relative performance means the amount of useful work done per clock cycle.

  11. Driving Factors in HW/SW Co-Design Fig. 1.6 Driving Factors in hardware/software codesign CoDesignbook

  12. HW/SW Co-Design Space related to design methodologies

  13. Platform Selection • General-purpose platforms, such as processors or FPGAs, can support a wide range of applications. • Application-specific platforms, such as ASICs, are optimized for a single application • In the middle, domain-specific platforms (e.g. DSP, ASIP) are optimized for a range of applications. • Signal processing, cryptography, networking

More Related