Hardware-Software Co-Design in Practice: A Case Study in Image Processing

Recent research on field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) has yielded devices capable to compete against both digital signal processors and general purpose processors. Due to their resources in terms of logical gates and processing speed, FPGAs have made their way into numerous new areas previously dominated by dedicated hardware architectures, i.e., ASICs, digital signal processors, and microcontrollers. This paper presents a case study in field of image processing in which the new FPGA generation allows for a system design that exhibits near-to-hardware performance at low system development costs. The system's high performance is due to application-specific hardware components that are attached to a soft-core processor; the design follows the hardware/software co-design guidelines. This standalone embedded system executes both general control tasks written in C/C++ and sophisticated image processing algorithms implemented in the hardware description language VHDL