Hardware/software partitioning for multi-function systems

We are interested in optimizing the design of multi-function embedded systems that run a pre-specified set of applications, such as multi-standard audio/video codecs and multi-system phones. Such systems usually have stringent performance constraints and tend to have mixed hardware-software implementations. The current state of the art in the hardware/software codesign of such systems is to design for each application separately. This often leads to application-specific sub-optimal decisions and inconsistent mappings of common nodes in different applications. We use these as the guiding principles to formulate, as a codesign problem, the design and synthesis of an efficient hardwaresoftware implementation for a multi-function embedded system. Our solution methodology is to first identify nodes that represent similar functionality across different applications. Such “common