Integer Programming for Partitioning in Software Oriented Codesign

This paper presents a new partitioning method for software oriented hardware /software codesign. It is applied to the use of field--programmable accelerator boards. In the underlying model the dedicated hardware has no direct access to the host memory, and communication is slow. Therefore detailed data--flow information is necessary to minimize the communication overhead between host and accelerator board. The partitioning problem is formulated as an integer (linear) program which simultaneously determines which code regions should be implemented in dedicated hardware and which data has to be communicated, so that well--known optimization algorithms can be applied. 1 Introduction The goal of software oriented hardware/software codesign is to improve system performance by moving time-critical parts of a program to hardware. This approach is attracting increasing interest since it uses simple specifications in common programming languages and allows the use of automatically designed ded..