One-dimensional Search Algorithms for Hardware/Software Partitioning

Hardware/software (HW/SW) partitioning is one of the key challenges in HW/SW co-design. This paper presents a new formulation to handle the HW/SW partitioning problem, which has been proved to be NP-hard. The proposed formulation transforms the partitioning problem into an extended 0-1 knapsack problem that is approximately solved in this paper by scanning a one-dimensional search space, instead of scanning a two-dimensional search space as presented in the literature cited in this paper. Two heuristic algorithms are proposed to explore the feasible partitions to meet the given constraints. The time complexity of the latest heuristic algorithm is significantly reduced from O(d_x ldr d_y ldr n³) to O(n log n + d ldr (n + m)) for the given graphs with n nodes and m edges, where d_x ldr d_y is the number of the fragments of the scanned two-dimensional search space, and d is that of the scanned one-dimensional search space. Empirical results show that the proposed algorithms run extremely fast and still produce better or similar solutions in comparison with the latest algorithm.