H/W versus S/W Design Partition Principles

Many functions can be realised in software or hardware.

Decide what to do in hardware:

• physical I/O (line drivers/transducers/media interfaces),
• highly compute-intensive, fixed functions,

what to do on custom processors or with custom instructions/coprocessors on an extensible processor:

• bit-oriented operations,
• highly compute-intensive SIMD,
• other algorithms with custom data paths,
• algorithms that might be altered post tape out.

and what to do in S/W on standard cores:

• highly-complex, non-repetitive functions,
• low-throughput computations of any sort,
• functions that might be altered post tape out,
• generally, as much as possible.

Custom processor synthesis commercial offering: See (link updated) »Tensilica Customizable Processor and DSP IP