Hardware/software partitioning using integer programming

One of the key problems in hardware/software codesign is hardware/software partitioning. This paper describes a new approach to hardware/software partitioning using integer programming (IP). The advantage of using IP is that optimal results are calculated respective to the chosen objective function. The partitioning approach works fully automatic and supports multi-processor systems, interfacing and hardware sharing. In contrast to other approaches where special estimators are used, we use compilation and synthesis tools for cost estimation. The increased time for calculating the cost metrics is compensated by an improved quality of the estimations compared to the results of estimators. Therefore, fewer iteration steps of partitioning will be needed. The paper shows that using integer programming to solve the hardware/software partitioning problem is feasible and leads to promising results.