3. Hardware/software partitioning

3.1 General idea

Software/hardware partitioning generally consists in separating the realization of a system into software and hardware components, with the aim of satisfying given design constraints. The level of granularity of the reasoning considered during this partitioning is variable: the coarse-grain level focuses, for example, on functions, tasks or processes, while the fine-grain level typically focuses on elementary instructions/operations and basic blocks. Coarse-grain partitioning is often easier to infer from specifications, at the cost of sub-optimality from a realization point of view. Fine-grain partitioning has the advantage of being more precise, but has the disadvantage of being less practical on the global scale of joint design, due to the very large number of solutions...