Architecture and application partitioning for reconfigurable system design

This paper presents a Genetic Algorithm (GA) based approach for Hardware/Software partitioning targeting an architecture composed of a processor and a dynamically reconfigurable datapath (FPGA). From an acyclic task graph and a set of Area-Time implementation trade offs points for each task, our GA performs HW/SW partitioning and scheduling such that the global application execution time is minimized. The efficiency of our GA is established through its application to a AC-3 decoder function and its performance is compared with a greedy algorithm.