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Hardware/software partitioning of floating point software applications to fixed-pointed coprocessor circuits

Published: 19 October 2008 Publication History

Abstract

While hardware/software partitioning has been shown to provide significant performance gains, most hardware/software partitioning approaches are limited to partitioning computational kernels utilizing integers or fixed point implementations. Software developers often initially develop an application using built-in floating point representations and later convert the application to a fixed point representation - a potentially time consuming process. In this paper, we present a hardware/software partitioning approach for floating point applications that eliminates the need for developers to rewrite software applications for fixed point implementations. Instead, the proposed approach incorporates efficient, configurable floating point to fixed point and fixed point to floating point hardware converters at the boundary between the hardware coprocessors and memory. This effectively separates the system into a floating point domain consisting of the microprocessor and memory subsystem and a fixed point domain consisting of the partitioned hardware coprocessors, thereby providing an efficient and rapid method for implementing fixed point hardware coprocessors.

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  • (2009)Float-to-fixed and fixed-to-float hardware converters for rapid hardware/software partitioning of floating point software applications to static and dynamic fixed point coprocessorsDesign Automation for Embedded Systems10.1007/s10617-009-9044-413:3(139-157)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2009

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cover image ACM Conferences
CODES+ISSS '08: Proceedings of the 6th IEEE/ACM/IFIP international conference on Hardware/Software codesign and system synthesis
October 2008
288 pages
ISBN:9781605584706
DOI:10.1145/1450135
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 19 October 2008

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Author Tags

  1. fixed point
  2. floating point
  3. floating point to fixed conversion
  4. hardware/software partitioning

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ESWEEK 08
ESWEEK 08: Fourth Embedded Systems Week
October 19 - 24, 2008
GA, Atlanta, USA

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CODES+ISSS '08 Paper Acceptance Rate 44 of 143 submissions, 31%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 280 of 864 submissions, 32%

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View all
  • (2009)Float-to-fixed and fixed-to-float hardware converters for rapid hardware/software partitioning of floating point software applications to static and dynamic fixed point coprocessorsDesign Automation for Embedded Systems10.1007/s10617-009-9044-413:3(139-157)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2009

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