Computing communication cost by Petri nets for hardware/software codesign

This work presents a method to compute communication cost by applying Petri nets. This cost is being used to guide the hardware/software partitioning in a methodology for hardware/software codesign context, which is being developed. Petri nets are a family of formalisms sharing basic principles. Although for each purpose or detail level one appropriated formalism have to be chosen from the family, the transformation from one formalism to another could be sound. The use of Petri makes the partitioning method independent on a specific description mechanism. Additionally, Petri net as an intermediate format allows to analyse behavioral properties of the specification and formally to compute performance indices which are used in the partitioning process