Performance evaluation tool for rapid prototyping of hardware-software codesigns

Performance evaluation is essential for tradeoff analysis during rapid prototyping. Existing performance evaluation strategies based on co-simulation and static analysis are either too slow or error prone. We therefore present an intermediate approach based on profiling and scheduling for rapid prototyping of hardware-software codesigns. Our performance evaluation tool obtains representative task timings by profiling which is done simultaneously with system specification. During design space exploration the tool obtains performance estimates by using well known scheduling and novel retiming heuristics. It is capable of obtaining both nonpipelined and pipelined schedules. The tool includes an area estimator which calculates the amount of hardware area required by the design by taking resource sharing between different hardware tasks into account. The tool also allows the user to evaluate the performance of a particular schedule with different task timings. In contrast to co-simulation and static analysis, the tool is able to provide fast and accurate performance estimates. The effectiveness of the tool in a rapid prototyping environment is demonstrated by a case study.