Exploring optimal solution to hardware/software partitioning for synchronous model

Computer aided hardware/software partitioning is one of the key challenges in hardware/software co-design. This paper describes a new approach to hardware/software partitioning for a synchronous communication model including multiple hardware devices. We transform the partitioning into a reachability problem of timed automata. By means of an optimal reachability algorithm, the optimal solution can be obtained with limited resources in hardware. To relax the initial condition of the partitioning for optimization, two algorithms are designed to explore the dependency relations among processes in the sequential specification. Moreover, we propose a scheduling algorithm to improve the synchronous communication efficiency further after partitioning stage. Some experiments are conducted with the model checker UPPAAL to show our approach is both effective and efficient.