Hardware/Software Partitioning and Static Task Scheduling on Runtime Reconfigurable FPGAs using a SMT Solver

Abstract

FPGAs are often used together with a CPU as hardware accelerators. A runtime reconfigurable FPGA allows part of the FPGA area to be reconfigured while the remainder continues to operate without interruption, so that hardware tasks can be placed and removed dynamically at runtime. In this paper, we formulate and solve the problem of optimal hardware/software partitioning and static task scheduling for a hybrid FPGA/CPU device, with the optimization objective of minimizing the total schedule length, in the framework of satisfiability modulo theories (SMT) with linear integer arithmetic.