SPARTA: A System Partitioning Aid

This paper presents SPARTA, the System PARTitioning Aid. Partitioning is the design phase in which a system´s functionality is divided into smaller parts that fit onto physical units. SPARTA is a unique and interesting approach to computer-aided partitioning of systems SPARTA performs the tedious calculation of each design factor (such as area) for each partition (such as chips). This allows the designer to evaluate many partitionings within a very short time with minimal effort. SPARTA does not generate partitionings, it evaluates the user´s partitionings in a way similar to spreadsheet programs. SPARTA was designed as a testbed for future work on partitioning algorithms.