Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences

Previous work in software/hardware codesign has addressed issues in system modeling, partitioning, and mixed module simulation and integration. Software estimation, which provides software metrics to assist the software/hardware partitioning, has not been studied. In order to rapidly explore large design space encountered in software/hardware systems, automatic software estimation is indispensable in software/hardware partitioning in which designers or partitioning tools must trade off a hardware with a software implementation for the whole or a part of the system under design. In this report we present a software estimator that provides three software metrics --- execution time, program-memory size and data-memory size for a specific executing on a given processor. Experiments have shown that our estimator has less than 20% estimation errors on different designs spanning from straight line code to code with branches and loops and even to hierarchical specifications. Experiments also show that our estimator is fast and can provide rapid feedback to the designers or partitioning tools to quickly evaluate different design alternatives.