Reliable pre-scheduling delay estimation for hardware/software partitioning

Hardware and Software co-design has become one of the main methodologies in modern embedded systems. The partitioning step, i.e. to decide which components of the system should be implemented in hardware and which ones in software, is the most important step in the embedded systems. Since the costs and delays of the final design strongly depend on partitioning results, there is a need to get an accurate estimate for hardware area, delay and power. However, accurate delay estimation methods are slow as they need a scheduling step. In this paper, we propose a reliable delay estimation method to be used within the partitioning step prior to the scheduling step.