Hardware/software co-design of a fingerprint recognition system

System design often involves software design as well as hardware design. The two aspects are separated early in the design cycle and have very little interaction until the system integration stage. Designers often specify hardware without fully appreciating the computational requirement of software. With developments in electronic design automation tools for VLSI (or ASIC) design and software technology, trade-offs between software and hardware have become increasingly possible and in most cases, advantageous. Hardware/software co-design is an approach to system design which allows hardware and software design aspects of a system to be considered concurrently. The decision to allocate functionality to hardware or software can then be made in such a way that it may have benefits in terms of improved overall system performance, improved reliability and lower cost. In the case of fingerprint recognition systems, exploring the cost and performance trade-offs between different implementations is the critical deciding factor for their use in commercial/industrial environments. For a fingerprint system, the requirement is usually that the system should be fast and cheap without sacrificing accuracy or security. The research, discussed in this paper, examined the hardware/software trade-offs possible in designing a fingerprint recognition system