A Practical Introduction to Hardware/Software Codesign

This is a practical book for computer engineers who want to understand or implement hardware/software systems. It focuses on problems that require one to combine hardware design with software design – such problems can be solved with hardware/software codesign. When used properly, hardware/software co- sign works better than hardware design or software design alone: it can improve the overall performance of digital systems, and it can shorten their design time. Hardware/software codesign can help a designer to make trade-offs between the ?exibility and the performanceof a digital system. To achieve this, a designer needs to combine two radically different ways of design: the sequential way of dec- position in time, using software, with the parallel way of decomposition in space, using hardware. Intended Audience This book assumes that you have a basic understandingof hardware that you are - miliar with standard digital hardware componentssuch as registers, logic gates, and components such as multiplexers and arithmetic operators. The book also assumes that you know how to write a program in C. These topics are usually covered in an introductory course on computer engineering or in a combination of courses on digital design and software engineering.