Sw/Hw Partitioning and Scheduling on Region-Based Dynamic Partial Reconfigurable System-on-Chip

Abstract

A heterogeneous system-on-chip (SoC) integrates multiple types of processors on the same chip. It has great advantages in many aspects, such as processing capacity, size, weight, cost, power, and energy consumption, which result in it being widely adopted in many fields. The SoC based on region-based dynamic partial reconfigurable (DPR) FPGA plays an important role in the SoC field. However, delivering its powerful capacity to the consumer depends on the efficient Sw/Hw partitioning and scheduling technology that determines the resource volume of the DPR region, the mapping of the application to the DPR region and other processors, and the schedule of the task and its reconfiguration. This paper first proposes an exact approach based on the mixed integer linear programming (MILP) for the Sw/Hw partitioning and scheduling problem. The proposed MILP is able to solve the problem optimally; however, its scalability is poor, despite that we carefully designed its formulation and tried to make it as concise as possible. Therefore, a multi-step hybrid method that combines graph partitioning and MILP is proposed, which is able to reduce the time complexity significantly with the solution quality being degraded marginally. A set of experiments is carried out using a set of real-life applications, and the result demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed methods.