An automatic hardware-software partitioner based on the possibilistic programming

The problem of hardware-software partitioning in the design of embedded systems is addressed. Uncertainties about the performance of the options for realization are expressed in triangular possibilistic numbers. To handle such numbers an integer programming formulation of the partitioning problem is derived. This formulation can be converted into a possibilistic program without changing the asymptotic computational complexity. The approach is illustrated with results obtained with the receiver part of a transceiver of a wireless indoor spread spectrum system. This example and several other experiments have shown that these optimizations can reach solutions within seconds for designs of that complexity and above