Profiling in the ASP codesign environment

Automation of the hardware/software codesign (HSC) methodology brings with it the need to develop sophisticated high-level profiling tools. This paper presents a profiling tool which uses execution profiling on standard C code to obtain accurate and consistent times at the level of individual compound code sections. This tool is used in the ASP hardware/software codesign project. The results from this tool show that profiling must be performed on dedicated hardware which is as close as possible to the final implementation, as opposed to a workstation. Further, in this paper a formula is derived for the number of times a program has to be profiled in order to get an accurate estimate of the number of times a loop with an indeterminate loop count is executed.