A new approach to solving the hardware-software partitioning problem in embedded system design

We present a new approach for solving the hardware-software partitioning problem in embedded system design. Our approach is based on transforming an instance of the hardware-software partitioning problem into an instance of a deterministic scheduling with rejection problem that minimizes a function of the completion times of the tasks. A solution to this real-time scheduling problem yields a partition of the system functionality and provides valuable feedback to the system designer. Experimental results indicate that the simplicity and effective solution techniques of our approach make it ideally suited as an automated design analysis tool in embedded system design.