Efficient approximate algorithm for hardware/software partitioning

Hardware/software (HW/SW) partitioning is one of the crucial steps of co-design systems. It determines which components of the systems are implemented in hardware and which ones are in software. In this paper the computing model is extended to cater for the path-based HW/SW partitioning with the fine granularity in which communication penalties between system components must be considered. On the new computing model an efficient heuristic algorithm is developed, in which both speedup in hardware and communication penalty are taken into account. Simulation results show that the heuristic algorithm runs fast and is able to produce high-quality approximate solutions. The difference between the approximate solutions and the optimal ones is bounded by 3.5%, and it hardly increases with the increase in the problem size. ? 2009 IEEE.EI