Embedded Systems Hardware Software Partitioning Using MiniMax Algorithm

Embedded systems (ES) represent the most important elements in modern intelligent systems. An ES is a mix of hardware blocks (HW) and software blocks (SW), executing in collaboration to achieve specific functionalities. Designing a good ES is driven by several factors, related to non-functional requirements. The most influencing factors are the cost of the hardware area and the execution time. The Co-design is one of the most design methodologies, used to optimize those factors while meeting the functional specifications. The Hardware Software Partitioning (HSP) is a major step in this process of Co-design. The HSP decides for each block, whether it is more advantageous to be affected to the hardware part or to the software part. Most of previous works study the optimization of one factor with the respect of a given constraint on the other factor. In this paper, we propose a novel approach aimed to simultaneously optimize the hardware area and the execution time of the system. The approach is inspired from the GO game and based on Minimax algorithm. Experimental results show that the proposed approach leads to more optimal solutions comparing to the Genetic Algorithm (GA).