A Hardware/Software Co-design Method and Its Evaluation to ITS Image Processing and Driver-Support Systems

In hardware/software co-design, the trade-off between hardware and software is performed by considering function and performance as the main conditions. In embedded systems, which need the development of immense software on microprocessor and many LSIs as hardware, the implement ability of components reuse serves as a key of development success. In this paper, we propose a hardware/software co-design method using trade-off parameters of processing time, memory size, development man-hours, and the number of gates. The method also uses real-time evaluation of re-use parts. We adopt system level language SpecC for modeling the proposed method. SpecC is C language with the syntax for hardware description and has the feature of being able to describe hardware and software in a single language. The proposed method was applied to ITS (Intelligent Transport Systems) safe driving support system and evaluated.