Towards a model for hardware and software functional partitioning

We describe a model that supports the functional partitioning of a system-level functional specification among hardware and software components. The model includes only the information needed by partitioning, and thus can be communicated freely and generated automatically. Based on characteristics of several real examples, we describe a technique for automatically generating generic model instances, on which partitioning heuristics can be applied and fairly compared. Such comparisons will become increasingly important as research begins to focus on fast yet effective functional partitioning techniques. We describe a set of tools for converting a specification to the model, for generating generic model instances, and for applying and comparing partitioning heuristics, available via ftp. Use of these tools may greatly reduce duplicated efforts among researchers wishing to investigate hardware/software partitioning heuristics.