Architectural Partitioning for System Level Design

Architectural partitioning is introduced as a new phase in system level synthesis. Architectural partitioning extracts high level structure from the behavior of an architecture. This paper describes the APARTY architectural partitioner, an automatic Architectural PARTYtioner that supports synthesis in the System Architect's Workbench. APARTY uses a unique multi-stage clustering technique. Knowledge of the high level structure of an architecture aids synthesis tools in choosing a better design in terms of area. For one example, architectural partitioning reduced the number of wiring tracks in the final design by 20%.