Hardware/software partitioning for platform-based design method

Ant system algorithm has the advantages of positive feedback and efficient convergence in optimal searching, but it lacks initial pheromone, which greatly limits this algorithm's searching speed. Oriented to platform-based design of system-on-a-chip, we present a hardware/software bi-partitioning algorithm based on Ant system algorithm with initial pheromone. The main ideas are: a) Reuse the partitioning result of reference design provided by platform-based design method as current design's initial partitioning, which is then converted into the initial pheromone needed by Ant system algorithm, b) Search for the optimal partitioning scheme with the Ant system algorithm based on the initial pheromone. Our algorithm adopts system level reusing feature of platform-based design method to prevent the disadvantages of Ant system algorithm. Experiments show our algorithm improves the efficiency of Ant system algorithm by an average of forty percent.