A Real-Valued Coding Mechanism for Software-Hardware Partitioning in SoC Design

Hardware/software partitioning plays significant role in the field of SoC design. One of the primary steps of the Hardware/software partitioning is to represent search space solutions. Under the existing work, the search space solutions are represented with binary coding or integer coding. However, with the increasing of SoC scale, the partitioning performance of these coding will have greatly affection. Otherwise, real coding has been considered for the representation issue when tackling high-dimensional optimization problems. In this paper, we study the real-coded mechanism for Hardware/software partitioning, and propose a non-uniform mapping method. Both the uniform and non-uniform mapping method has been analyzed by comparisons. Experimental results show that the real-coded mechanism outperforms integer-coded mechanism significantly, and non-uniform mapping technique outperforms uniform mapping technique significantly, specially in dealing with large-scale Hardware/software partitioning problems. This result owes much to the flexibility of the proposed real-coded mechanism.