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Impact of Hardware/Software Partitioning
and MicroBlaze FPGA Configurations
on the Embedded Systems Performances
Im
ne Mhadhbi, Nabil Litayem, Slim Ben Othman
and Slim Ben Saoud
รจ
Abstract Due to their
flexible architecture, lower-cost and faster processing, Field
Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) presents one of the stimulating choices for
implementing modern embedded systems. This is due to their intrinsic parallelism,
fast processing speed, rising integration scale and lower-cost solution. This kind of
platforms can be considered as a futuristic implementation platform. The growing
con
fl
gurable logic capacity of FPGA has enabled designers to incorporate one or
more processors in FPGA platform. In contrast to the traditional hard cores, the
soft cores processors present an interesting solutions for implementing embedded
applications. They give designers the ability to adapt many con
gurations to their
speci
c application; including memory subsystems, interrupt handling, ISA features,
etc. Faced to the various problems related to the selection of an ef
cient soft-core
FPGA embedded processor with appropriate con
guration, co-design methodology
presents a good deal for embedded designers. The most crucial step in the design of
embedded systems is the hardware/software partitioning. This step consists of
deciding which component is suitable for hardware implementation and which one is
more appropriate for software implementation. This research
field is especially
active (always on the move) and several approaches are proposed. In this chap-
ter, we will present our contribution on the hardware/software partitioning co-design
approach, and discuss their involvement on design acceleration and architecture
performances. The
first part of this chapter describes the effect of the MicroBlaze
Xilinx con
guration on the embedded system performance. The second part
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