A consistent labeling approach to hardware software partitioning

Design of embedded systems has brought the discipline of hardware software codesign into focus. A major task of such codesign activity is partitioning the functions into hardware and software implementation sets. In this paper, we propose an algorithm which performs such partitioning and also allocates the functions to modules. The task has been formulated as a consistent labeling problem. To deal with the combinatorial nature of the problem, a number of heuristics have been proposed and their relative performances have been evaluated experimentally. The algorithm has been applied to solve several design problems.