Adaptive Metrics for System-Level Functional Partitioning

Codesign is a design methodology aiming at the integration of both hardware and software into the same System-on-Chip architecture. This paper presents a new methodology to address the Codesign problem based on the adaptive computation approach. Adaptivity implies that due to input changes the output of the system is updated by only re-evaluating those portions of the program affected by the changes. This concept has been applied successfully to acceleration of software in the past. In this work, we propose to utilize the concept of adaptivity in a different context as a means to collect information on the dynamics of a complex computation. We introduce a new metric called codesign intensity ordering metric. The codesign intensity ordering metric is instrumental in efficiently identifying the computationally intensive portions in a computation as well as relatively static regions.