Design flow for HW/SW acceleration transparency in the thumbpod secure embedded system

This paper describes a case study and design flow of a secure embedded system called thumbpod, which uses cryptographic and biometric signal processing acceleration. It presents the concept of HW/SW acceleration transparency, a systematic method to accelerate Java functions in both software and hardware. An example of acceleration transparency for a Rijndael encryption function is presented. Acceleration transparency yields software and hardware performance gains of 333×.