HW/SW Partitioning Using High Level Metrics

The Kernighan/Lin graph partitioning heuristic, also known as min-cut, has been enhanced over decades and successfully adopted for circuit partitioning. During last years extended versions have been developed to address functional partitioning as it is needed to solve the much investigated co-design problem of partitioning a system’s coarse-grained functions among hardware and software components. In combination with advanced code parsing on system level to derive reliable metrics for execution time and hardware size, the heuristic is immediately applicable in an automatic way to achieve a partitioning decision in the early stages of a design process. In this paper we demonstrate a consistent design methodology combining advanced code analysis and an extended Kernighan/Lin heuristic for functional partitioning applied to an industry-designed UMTS receiver component at highest abstraction level.