A New Approach to Execution Time Estimations in a Hardware/Software Codesign Environment

Abstract:- This study addresses a new approach to the Hardware/Software partitioning problem focused on the integration of communication scheduling during design space exploration. Frequently in this phase most communication channel features are ignored, since communications are identified with abstract channels. It is conceivable that once the abstract channels have been mapped into an actual communication channel (i.e. a bus) the area and execution time of the solution may change considerably. A novel methodology, that schedules the communications taking into account the physical features of the communication channel, is presented. It has been integrated into a partitioning tool based on Genetic Algorithms. This methodology attempts to accomplish a deep study of the communication impact during the design space exploration without increasing significantly the complexity of the algorithm. Key-Words:- Hardware/Software codesign, Computer-Aided Design, partitioning, communications scheduling