Low-cost hardware profiling of run-time and energy in FPGA embedded processors

This paper introduces a low-overhead hardware profiling architecture, called LEAP, that attains real-time cycle and energy profiles of an FPGA-based soft processor. A novel technique is used to associate profiling data with specific functions in a way that is area- and power-efficient. Results show that relative to a previously-published hardware profiler, our design uses up to 18× less area and 8.6× less energy. LEAP is designed to be extensible for a variety of profiling tasks, three of which are investigated in this paper. We also demonstrate the utility of LEAP in the context of hardware/software co-design of processor/accelerator FPGA-based systems.