Software/hardware partitioner

The current trend in processor's design is to add multiple cores to increase the system's overall performance but this is not a solution to increasing the performance of serial applications. Due to its potential to greatly accelerate a wide variety of serial applications, reconfigurable computing has become a subject of a great deal of research. Its key feature is the ability to perform computations in hardware in order to increase performance, while retaining much of the flexibility of a software solution. In this paper, we address the problem of fully automating the process of selecting the code to be used for hardware acceleration. We present a software-hardware partitioning system that transforms Impulse C source code into blocks of C and VHDL code. The resulting C code will be run on the CPU, while the VHDL code will be implemented on a reconfigurable hardware, e.g. a FPGA.