Abstract: Hardware/software(HW/SW) partitioning is one of the crucial steps in HW/SW co-design. It determines which componented of the system arc implemented on hardware and which ones on software. It has been proved that the HW/SW partitioning problem is NP-hard. This paper presented an heuristic algorithm for the HW/SW partitioning problem, which has been treated as an extended 0-1 knapsack problem. Tabu search was used to further the solution obtamed through the proposed heuristic algorithm, in order to minimize the hardware cost with the constraints of the soft- ware cost and the communication cost. Experimental results show that the algorithms proposed in the paper can produce better solution than the latest work, and the improvement is up to 28%.

Key words: Hardware/Software partitioning, Heuristic algorithm, 0-1 knapsack problem, Tabu search