A codesign case study in computer graphics

This paper describes a codesign case study where a computer graphics application is examined with the intention to speed up its execution. The application is specified as a C program, and is characterized by the lack of a simple compute-intensive kernel. The hardware/software partitioning is based on information obtained from software profiling and the resulting design is validated through co-simulation. A locally developed interface model, Merlin, is used as the basis for co-simulation. The achieved speed-up is estimated based on an analysis of profile information.