A hybrid genetic algorithm for constrained hardware- software partitioning

In this article, we propose a novel partitioning method for hardware-software codesign based on a genetic algorithm that has been enhanced for this specific task. Given a high- level program and an area constraint, our software considers different granularities levels to discover the most interesting blocks to be implemented in ad hoc functional units that can then be used as new instructions in a Move processor. Various optimizations are conducted to obtain a clean, very fast (in the order of a few seconds) and efficient partitioning on programs ranging from a few to several hundreds of lines of code.