Impact of Hardware/Software Partitioning and MicroBlaze FPGA Configurations on the Embedded Systems Performances

Due to their flexible architecture, lower-cost and faster processing, Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) presents one of the stimulating choices for implementing modern embedded systems. This is due to their intrinsic parallelism, fast processing speed, rising integration scale and lower-cost solution. This kind of platforms can be considered as a futuristic implementation platform. The growing configurable logic capacity of FPGA has enabled designers to incorporate one or more processors in FPGA platform. In contrast to the traditional hard cores, the soft cores processors present an interesting solutions for implementing embedded applications. They give designers the ability to adapt many configurations to their specific application; including memory subsystems, interrupt handling, ISA features, etc. Faced to the various problems related to the selection of an efficient soft-core FPGA embedded processor with appropriate configuration, co-design methodology presents a good deal for embedded designers. The most crucial step in the design of embedded systems is the hardware/software partitioning. This step consists of deciding which component is suitable for hardware implementation and which one is more appropriate for software implementation. This research field is especially active (always on the move) and several approaches are proposed. In this chapter, we will present our contribution on the hardware/software partitioning co-design approach, and discuss their involvement on design acceleration and architecture performances. The first part of this chapter describes the effect of the MicroBlaze Xilinx configuration on the embedded system performance. The second part introduces our new hardware/software partitioning approach on a complex secure lightweight cryptographic algorithm. This work can contribute to enforce the security of SCADA (Supervision Control and Data Acquisition) systems and the DSS (Digital Signal Standard) without compromising the cost and the performance of the final system.