Hardware/software partitioning of floating point software applications to fixed-pointed coprocessor circuits

Abstract

While hardware/software partitioning has been shown to provide significant performance gains, most hardware/software partitioning approaches are limited to partitioning computational kernels utilizing integers or fixed point implementations. Software developers often initially develop an application using built-in floating point representations and later convert the application to a fixed point representation - a potentially time consuming process. In this paper, we present a hardware/software partitioning approach for floating point applications that eliminates the need for developers to rewrite software applications for fixed point implementations. Instead, the proposed approach incorporates efficient, configurable floating point to fixed point and fixed point to floating point hardware converters at the boundary between the hardware coprocessors and memory. This effectively separates the system into a floating point domain consisting of the microprocessor and memory subsystem and a fixed point domain consisting of the partitioned hardware coprocessors, thereby providing an efficient and rapid method for implementing fixed point hardware coprocessors.