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K. Ambrosch, C. Helpa, J. Lechner, R. Leidenfrost, T. Panhofer, A. platschek, S. Ramberger, U. Stadler, D. Steiner, H. Trinkl, C. Widtmann, M. Delvai:
"Design Variety in Hardware/Software Codesign - Implementations of an AES Encoder";
in: "Austrochip Mikroelektroniktagung", Austrochip 2006, 2006, 181 - 188.

FPGAs open completely new possibilities in system design, allowing to move the border between hard- and software. This, on the one hand opens the way to tune system parameters according to specific application needs, but on the other hand is a quite complex task and an unfavourable partitioning could worsen the overall system compared to a pure software or a pure hardware implementation. In this paper we investigate the impact of different hardware/software partitioning at the example of an AES encoder. Several groups of students implemented such an AES encoder, whereas the hardware/software partitioning was not a priori given, but was chosen by each group individually. Each implementation was evaluated using an evaluation matrix, which rated design parameters such as power consumption, performance, lines of code, etc. At the end of this paper we compare all implementations and discuss the impact of the partitioning in particular.

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