Hardware/Software Partitioning for Embedded Systems


Abstract

Current methods for designing embedded systems require specifying and designing hardware and software separately. Hardware/software partitioning is concerned with deciding which function is to be implemented in Hardware (HW) and Software (SW). This type of partitioning process is decided a priori to the design process and is adhered to as much as possible because any changes in this partition may necessitate extensive redesign. As partitioning is an NP hard problem, application of the exact methods tends to be quite slow for bigger dimensions of the problem. Heuristic/evolutionary methods have been proposed for partitioning problems. This chapter deals with multi-objective optimization of minimizing two objectives area and the execution time of the partition. To validate the efficiency of the algorithms, performance metrics are calculated. Experimental results for the HW/SW partition for mediabench and DSP benchmarks are tabulated and analyzed.