HW-SW codesign of a positioning system. From UML to implementation case study

Abstract

During the last years, there has been a growing interest in systems related to the location of objects into three dimensional environments and virtual reality applications. These systems, based on high-performance video-processing, have a big computational load, specially on image analysis phases. This work presents the process of HW-SW co-design and implementation of a positioning system. A methodology was applied in which the requirements and initial functionality was captured in UML-MARTE. After a high-level profiling of the system, an acceleration of most time-demanding stages is achieved by combining the hardware and software capabilities of Zynq platform targeting a low power embedded system. The performance obtained through hardware acceleration of critical parts of the application leads to a significant improvement in the throughput of the whole system. On the other hand, the presented work can also be seen as a proof of concept of the followed methodology.