Using Blind Optimization Algorithm for Hardware/Software Partitioning

Hardware/software partitioning is playing an important role in designing complex embedded systems. In this paper, by considering the parallelism between hardware and software, we propose a more practical hardware/software partitioning method which can be combined with task scheduling. In one aspect, in order to select a more suitable partitioning algorithm, the concept of blind optimization algorithm for hardware/software partitioning is presented, and the advantages of this kind of algorithms are illustrated by diagrams. We combined the Shuffled Frog Leaping Algorithm (SFLA) with Earliest Time First (ETF), a scheduling algorithm, and proposed a new hardware/software partitioning algorithm named SFLA-ETF. The solution quality and algorithm execution time of SFLA-ETF is better than other blind algorithms and it can also obtain better solutions than non-blind optimization algorithm.