A new hardware/software partitioning technique

Abstract

Hardware/software (HW/SW) partitioning is one of the most important issues of co-design systems, deciding which components of the system could be implemented in hardware and which ones in software. It plays a crucial role in improving the system performance. HW/SW partitioning problem is also a NP-hard problem. In this paper, a new hardware/software partitioning technique is presented to reduce the overall execution time of the system; the technique is based on dividing the task graphs into levels. In each level, the task with high computing cost and high communication cost is assigned to hardware implementation. If there is no task with the previous specifications, the technique computes granularity of each task, for the task with coarse grain is assigned to hardware implementation. Experimental results conclude that the proposed algorithm is an efficient algorithm to reduce the overall execution time and reduce hardware resources about 45% to the existing one.