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H. Kopetz:
"Modeling of Software-Hardware Complexes";
Vortrag: International Embedded Systems Symposiom (IESS'07), Irvine, Orange County, in Southern California (USA); 30.05.2007 - 01.06.2007; in: "Embedded System Design: Topics, Techniques and Trends", Springer Boston, Volume 231/2007 (2007), ISBN: 978-0-387-72257-3; S. 431 - 432.

The ever-increasing complexity level of embedded systems, the technology trends of the semiconductor industry to large production series of chips, the new possibilities of the FPGA technology to develop customized hardware of substantial size by software techniques, and the increased competition in the world market entail the need for an integrated development strategy for embedded hardware-software systems.
From a strictly functional point of view, where a user accesses the services of a component, it is irrelevant whether the services of the component are provided by software that is executed on a commercial-off-the shelf computer or by a special hardware-solution (e.g., by a dedicated field-programmable gate array--FPGA). From the non-functional points of view, there are substantial differences: For example, the power efficiency of an FPGA solution is two orders of magnitude better than the power efficiency of a software-on-CPU solution. If we go to a custom hardware solution (i.e., a specially designed chip), the power-efficiency can be improved by another order of magnitude. Power-efficiency is a very important system property in battery-operated devices. Similar differences can be noticed concerning speed and needed silicon area of the implementation of a given function.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-72258-0_39