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<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; layout-grid-mode: char;" align="left"><span class="text"><span style="font-family: ";Arial";,";sans-serif";; font-size: 9pt;">Profiling tools are computer-aided design (CAD) tools that help in determining the computationally intensive portions in software. Embedded systems consist of hardware and software components that execute concurrently and efficiently to execute a specific task or application. Profiling tools are used by embedded system designers to choose computationally intensive functions for hardware implementation and acceleration. In this paper we review and compare various existing profiling tools for FPGA-based embedded systems. We then describe Airwolf, an FPGAbased profiling tool. We present a quantitative comparison of Airwolf and a well known software-based profiling tool, GNU gprof. Four software benchmarks were used to obtain profiling results using Airwolf and gprof. We show that Airwolf provides up to 66.2% improvement in accuracy of profiled results and reduces the run time performance overhead, caused by software-based profiling tools, by up to 41.3%. The results show that Airwolf provides accurate profiling results with minimal overhead and it can help the designers of FPGA-based embedded systems in identifying the computationally intensive portions of software code for hardware implementation and acceleration.</span></span><span style="font-family: ";Arial";,";sans-serif";; font-size: 9pt;"></span></p>

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This paper presents an analysis and comparison of the profiled results using software-based profilers (SBP) and FPGA-Based Profilers (FPGA-BP) for a Nios II Processor system. SBP tools are commonly used to detect performance bottlenecks of a program by applying instrumentation code at the binary level and using sampling methods for performance data gathering. This can cause the reported profiled results to be inaccurate which can mislead the embedded designer to implement the improper software function in the hardware domain. FPGA-BP tools are profilers that contain dedicated hardware that can accurately measure the performance of the software system running on a soft-core processor. They require minimal code modification and do not use any sampling techniques to collect performance data. This can provide accurate results that embedded designers can use to create an efficient and effective hardware-software partition of an embedded system.

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