Abstract
This paper proposes a new hardware accelerator to speed up the performance of vector graphics applications on complex embedded systems. The resulting hardware accelerator is synthesized on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) and integrated with software components. The paper also introduces a hardware/software co-verification environment which provides in-system at-speed functional verification and performance evaluation to verify the hardware/software integrated architecture. The experimental results demonstrate that the integrated hardware accelerator is fifty times faster than a compiler-optimized software component and it enables vector graphics applications to run nearly two times faster. © 2011 IEEE.