Efficient heuristic and tabu search for hardware/software partitioning

Hardware/software (HW/SW) partitioning is a crucial step in HW/SW codesign that determines which components of the system are implemented on hardware and which ones on software. It has been proved that the HW/SW partitioning problem is NP-hard. In this paper, we present two approaches for HW/SW partitioning that aims to minimize the hardware cost while taking into account software and communication constraints. The first is a heuristic approach that treats the HW/SW partitioning problem as an extended 0–1 knapsack problem. In the second approach, tabu search is used to further improve the solution obtained from the proposed heuristic algorithm. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithms outperform a recently reported work by up to 28 %.