A Path-Based Technique for Estimating Hardware Runtime in HW/SW-Cosynthesis

One of the key issues in hardware/software--cosynthesis is precise estimation. The usual local estimation techniques are inadequate for globally optimising compilers and synthesis tools. We present a path based estimation technique which allows a computation time/quality tradeoff. The results show acceptable computation times while revealing much more potential parallelism than local list scheduling. 1 Introduction System level design becomes more important since the time to market (e.g. about 18 months for complex HW/SW systems [Keu94]) decreases at a continuously increasing complexity of mixed hardware/software systems. As a consequence, uniform specification of HW/SW systems, HW/SW partitioning, HW synthesis, SW synthesis, cosimulation etc. become important research areas. In the ambitious area of cosynthesis, hardware software partitioning plays a key role. There are some constraint--driven approaches which focus on this problem: The VULCAN system [GuMi92] is a hardware--oriented..