Partitioning for minimal memory in hardware-software codesign

In this paper, a new hardware-software partitioning algorithm is presented, in which the system behavioral description containing a mixture of hardware and software components is partitioned into hardware part and software part. The partitioning algorithm tries to minimize the given cost function under constraints on hardware resources or latency. Recursive moving of operations between hardware and software parts is used to find a near optimum partition and hill climbing is allowed to find a near optimum partition. Since memories (registers) may take substantial portion of the hardware part, memory cost is incorporated in the hardware cost. Experimental results show that our algorithm is effective in reducing memory cost without affecting other factors