System-level design space exploration for dedicated heterogeneous multi-processor systems

This work faces the problem of the HW/SW co-design of dedicated systems based on heterogeneous multi-processor architectures. In particular, it proposes a system-level design space exploration approach that allows the related co-design methodology to suggest an HW/SW partitioning of the application specification and a mapping of the partitioned entities onto an automatically selected heterogeneous multi-processor architecture. The modeling strategy and the description of the adopted heuristic and metrics represent the core of the paper while a simple case study allows clarifying the main features of the whole approach.