A codesign case study in computer graphics
Jens P. Brage, Jan Busk Madsen · 1994
This paper describes a codesign case study where a computer graphics application is examined with the intention to speed up its execution. The application is specified as a C program, and is characterized by the lack of a simple compute-intensive kernel. The hardware/software partitioning is based on information obtained from software profiling and the resulting design is validated through cosimulation. A locally developed interface model, Merlin, is used as the basis for co-simulation. The achieved speed-up is estimated based on an analysis of profile information. 1 Introduction Codesign, i.e., the combined development of hardware and software, can be roughly classified as follows: ffl Co-development of both hardware and software from a specification which does not favor either implementation strategy. ffl Hardware design of instruction set processors. Aside from hardware design, it also involves software analysis to optimize the instruction set. ffl Speed-up of an existing softwa...