An Effective Heuristic-Based Approach for Partitioning

As being one of the most crucial steps in the design of embedded systems, hardware/software partitioning has received more concern than ever. The performance of a system design will strongly depend on the efficiency of the partitioning. In this paper, we construct a communication graph for embedded system and describe the delay-related constraints and the cost-related objective based on the graph structure.Then, we propose a heuristic based on genetic algorithm and simulated annealing to solve the problem near optimally.We note that the genetic algorithmhas a strong global search capability, while the simulated annealing algorithmwill fail in a local optimal solution easily. Hence, we can incorporate simulated annealing algorithm in genetic algorithm.The combined algorithmwill providemore accurate near-optimal solutionwith faster speed. Experiment results show that the proposed algorithm produce more accurate partitions than the original genetic algorithm.