Partitioning and pipelining for performance-constrained hardware/software systems

In order to satisfy cost and performance requirements, digital signal processing and telecommunication systems are generally implemented with a combination of different components, from custom-designed chips to off-the-shelf processors. These components vary in their area, performance, programmability and so on, and the system functionality is partitioned amongst the components to best utilize this tradeoff. However, for performance critical designs, it is not sufficient to only implement the critical sections as custom-designed high-performance hardware, but it is also necessary to pipeline the system at several levels of granularity. We present a design flow and an algorithm to first allocate software and hardware components, and then partition and pipeline a throughput-constrained specification amongst the selected components. This is performed to best satisfy the throughput constraint at minimal application-specific integrated-circuit cost. Our ability to incorporate partitioning with pipelining at several levels of granularity enables us to attain high throughput designs, and also distinguishes this paper from previously proposed hardware/software partitioning algorithms.