System-Level Timing Performance Estimation Based on a Unifying HW/SW Performance Metric

The rapidly increasing complexity of embedded systems and the critical impact of non-functional requirements demand the adoption of an appropriate system-level HW/SW co-design methodology. This methodology tries to satisfy all design requirements by simultaneously considering several alternative HW/SW implementations. In this context, early performance estimation approaches are crucial in reducing the design space, thereby minimizing design time and cost. To address the challenge of system-level performance estimation, this work presents and formalizes a novel approach based on a unifying HW/SW performance metric for early execution time estimation. The proposed approach estimates the execution time of a C function when executed by different HW/SW processor technologies. The approach is validated through an extensive experimental study, demonstrating its effectiveness and efficiency in terms of estimation error (i.e., lower than 10%) and estimation time (close to zero) when compared to existing methods in the literature.