Characterizing power consumption and delay of functional/library components for hardware/software co-design of embedded systems

This article introduces a library of pre-characterized components to support hardware/software co-design of real-time embedded systems starting from high abstraction levels, e.g. formal description techniques. The library includes hardware components of different types and granularity modelled for power consumption, delay and area. Software components are also modelled. These software components range from the basic instructions set of a processor to a set of optimized library functions and IP cores used in the areas of DSP and image processing. Design tradeoffs enabled by the presence of different types of the same component can be efficiently utilized by the co-synthesis process. The co-synthesis process is refined in this article by an allocation-refinement step for this purpose.