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Efficient heuristic and tabu search for hardware/software partitioning

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Abstract

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 %.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 61173032.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Tianjin Polytechnic University, 300387, Tianjin, China

    Jigang Wu & Pu Wang

  2. Centre for High Performance Embedded Systems, Nanyang Technological University, 639798, Singapore, Republic of Singapore

    Siew-Kei Lam & Thambipillai Srikanthan

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  1. Jigang Wu
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  2. Pu Wang
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  4. Thambipillai Srikanthan
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Correspondence to Jigang Wu.

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Wu, J., Wang, P., Lam, SK. et al. Efficient heuristic and tabu search for hardware/software partitioning. J Supercomput 66, 118–134 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-013-0888-9

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