PARTIF: Interactive System‐level Partitioning

Abstract

This paper presents a methodology and a tool box for system-level partitioning in the behavioral domain. The methodology is based on an extended finite state machine model. Partitioning is achieved interactively through the application of five system-level transformation primitives: MOVE, MERGE, SPLIT, CUT and MAP. This scheme allows an interactive exploration of the solution space. The result of the partitioning is a set of interconnected and heterogeneous sub-systems. The partitioning tool box which has been developed is named PARTIE PARTIF includes an evaluation feedback loop that helps the designer estimate the quality of the design.

Constructing application-specific heterogeneous embedded architectures from custom HW/SW applications

“…It would also be interesting to see how system partitioning techniques (e.g. [9,6,7,15]) can be applied on our customized architectures.…”

“…Particularly error proned and timing consuming are the tasks of interfacing the hardware and software components together and providing communication between them. Designers currently spend a tremendous amount of time with low-level design details and extensive debugging to ensure correctness, thus leaving little room for optimization or explo- Most research efforts have focussed on higher level issues such as system behavioral modeling, system level transformations, and system partitioning [6,7,9,3,15,1,16,10,12,18]. Although these efforts have led to promising results, they are addressing largely complementary problems.…”

A methodology and algorithms for the design of hard real-time multitasking ASICs

“…The most relevant system research subdomain is hardware-software partitioning [Barros et al 1994;Ernst et al 1993;Gajski et al 1994;Gupta and De Micheli 1993;Ismail et al 1994]. The goal of software partitioning is to identify parts of computations which should be implemented on programmable and ASIC platforms so that an overall optimization function is maximized.…”