A Petri net based approach for performing the initial allocation in hardware/software codesign

This work presents a method of hardware/software partitioning considering multiple software components. The proposed method uses Petri nets as a common formalism to perform quantitative and qualitative analysis. The use of Petri net permits one to use a specification nondependent partitioning method. As an intermediate format Petri net allows one to analyze properties of the specification and formally compute performance indices which are used in the partitioning process. This paper highlights methods of computing load balance, precedence relation degree and communication cost of behavioral description in order to perform the initial allocation along with partitioning. This paper is devoted to describing the initial allocation algorithm, although an overview of the general partitioning method is also presented.