System-level design space exploration for application-specific HW/SW systems

This work addresses the problem of the HW/SW co-design of heterogeneous multiprocessor application-specific systems. In particular, it describes how the proposed system-level design space exploration approach allows the related co-design methodology to suggest an HW/SW partitioning of the application specification, mapping this one onto an automatically selected ad-hoc heterogeneous multiprocessor architecture, being aware of both the computational and the communication issues. The modeling strategy and the description of the adopted heuristic and metrics represent the core of the paper while a simple case study allows to clarify the main features of the proposed approach.