Impact of Hardware/Software Partitioning and MicroBlaze FPGA Configurations on the Embedded Systems Performances - Complex System Modelling and Control Through Intelligent Soft Computations - page 701

Table 1 Comparative studies of the software/hardware design architectures
Software Hardware

Physical Constraints Execution time *

Energy consumption *

Integration *

Area *

Economic Constraints Cost * (Except high volume)

Flexibility *

Design time *

Time-to-market *

Fig. 2 Co-design fl flow using Xilinx EDK tool

based on the hardware/software partitioning step. The goal of that partitioning step
is to determine which components of the application are suitable for hardware or
software implementation. Hardware implementation is desirable to design ef

cient
embedded systems in term of execution time and computation (co-processors).
However, software implementation gives less performance in a reduced time. This
partitioning is depending on embedded systems constraints such as cost, ef ciency

and speed. The real paradigm of co-design methodology is the great choice of
hardware and software sections.
Co-design approaches promote the implementation of ef

cient embedded sys-
tems in a low development time by integrating hardware co-processors into soft-
ware design process. During the design process, fundamental decisions have
dramatically in final solution. Design

decisions have an impact of about 90 % of the overall cost. The most important
decision is that of hardware/software partitioning.

fl uenced the quality and the cost of the