CASCADE – CONFIGURABLE AND SCA

ABSTRACT
As the complexity of embedded systems grows rapidly, it is
common to accelerate critical tasks with hardware.  Designers
usually use off-the-shelf components or licensed IP cores to
shorten the time to market, but the hardware/software interfacing
is tedious, error-prone and usually not portable.  Besides, the
existing hardware seldom matches the requirements perfectly. 
CASCADE, the proposed design environment as an alternative,
generates coprocessing datapaths from the executing algorithms
specified in C/C++ and attaches these datapaths to the embedded
processor with an auto-generated software driver.  The number of
datapaths and their internal parallel functional units are scaled to
fit the application.  It seamlessly integrates the design tools of the
embedded processor to reduce the re-training/design efforts and
maintains short product development time as the pure software
approaches.  A JPEG encoder is built in CASCADE successfully
with an auto-generated four-MAC accelerator to achieve  623%
performance boost for our video application.