An approach to hardware/software partitioning for multiple hardware devices model

Computer aided hardware/software partitioning is one of the key challenges in hardware/software co-design. This paper describes a new approach to hardware/software partitioning for multiple hardware-devices model. The partitioning is transformed into a reachability problem of timed automata, and the optimal solution can be obtained by means of an optimal reachibility algorithm. To relax the initial condition of partitioning for optimization, two algorithms are designed to explore the dependency relations among processes in the sequential specification. Some experiments are conducted with model checker UPPAAL to show our approach is both effective and efficient. ? 2004 IEEE.EI