Integrated Coupling and Clock Frequency Assignment of Accelerators During Hardware/Software Partitioning

Hardware/software partitioning moves software kernels from a microprocessor to custom hardware accelerators. We consider advanced implementation options for accelerators, greatly increasing the partitioning solution space. One option tightly or loosely couples each accelerator with the microprocessor. Another option assigns a clock frequency to each accelerator, with a limit on the number of distinct frequencies. We previously presented efficient optimal solutions to each of those sub-problems independently. In this paper, we introduce heuristics to solve the two sub-problems in an integrated manner. The heuristics run in just seconds for large examples, yielding 2x additional speedup versus the independent solutions, for a total average speedup 5x greater than partitioning with a single coupling and single frequency.