This paper presents two heuristics for automatic hardware/software partitioning of system level specifications. Partitioning is performed at the granularity of blocks, loops, subprograms, and processes with the objective of performance optimization with a limited hardware and software cost. We define the metric values for partitioning and develop a cost function that guides partitioning towards the desired objective. We consider minimization of communication cost and improvement of the overall parallelism as essential criteria during partitioning. Two heuristics for hardware /software partitioning, formulated as a graph partitioning problem, are presented: one based on simulated annealing and the other on tabu search. Results of extensive experiments, including real-life examples, show the clear superiority of the tabu search based algorithm. Keywords: Hardware/software partitioning, Co-synthesis, Iterative improvement heuristics, Simulated annealing, Tabu search * This work has been p...

This paper presents a new high-level synthesis methodology to generate optimized implementations for multi-process behavioral descriptions. The concurrent communicating processes specification paradigm is widely used in digital circuit and system design, and is employed in all popular hardware description languages. It has been shown that inter-process communication and synchronization can result in complex timing inter-dependencies, which significantly affect the performance of a multi-process system. However, previous research on high-level synthesis typically takes a one-process-at-a-time approach, and the effects of interprocess communication and synchronization are ignored when performing tasks such as scheduling, resource sharing, etc. In this paper