Fast rescheduling of multi-rate systems for HW/SW partitioning algorithms

In modern designs for heterogeneous systems with their extreme requirements on power consumption, execution time, silicon area and time-to-market, the HW/SW partitioning problem belongs to the most challenging ones. Usually its formulation, based on task or process graphs with complex communication models, is intractable. Moreover most partitioning problems embed another NP-hard problem in its core: a huge number of valid schedules exist for a single partitioning solution. Powerful heuristics for the partitioning problem rely on list scheduling techniques to solve this scheduling problem. This paper is based on a rescheduling algorithm that performs better than popular list scheduling techniques and still preserves linear complexity by reusing former schedules. A sophisticated communication model is introduced and the rescheduling algorithm is modified to serve multi-core architectures with linear runtime.