Speedups from partitioning software kernels to FPGA hardware in embedded SoCs

Abstract

This paper presents a hardware/software partitioning methodology for improving performance in single-chip systems comprised by processor and reconfigurable logic. The reconfigurable logic is realized by field programmable gate array technology. Critical software parts are selected for acceleration on the reconfigurable logic. A generic hybrid system-on-chip platform, which can model the majority of existing processor-FPGA systems, is considered by the method. The partitioning method uses an automated kernel identification process at the basic-block level for detecting critical software portions. Three different instances of the generic platform and two sets of benchmarks are used in the experiments. The analysis on five real-life applications showed that these applications spend an average of 69% of their instruction count in 11% on average of their code. The extensive experimentation illustrates that for the systems composed by 32-bit processors the speedup of five applications ranges from 1.3 to 3.7 relative to an all software solution. For a platform composed by an 8-bit processor, the performance gains of eight DSP algorithms are considerably greater, since the average speedup equals 28.