Pipelining-based tradeoffs for hardware/software codesign of multimedia systems

In the last years, multimedia systems are present in an ever increasing number of applications. A software implementation often can not satisfy system timing constraints. This problem can be solved by adding specific hardware to the system. Lately, it has been developed some design methodologies for this type of hardware/software systems. Our research group have developed a hardware/software codesign environment named GACSYS (GAC's Codesign System) for designing this type of systems. In this article, we present our Hw/Sw partitioning tool. Main contribution of our tool is the following: it supports process-level pipelining and takes into account system power consumption. Thus, system designer can explore the design space to make new latency, area and power trade-offs.