Hardware-Software Partitioning at the Knowledge Level

摘要

Hardware-software co-design addresses the development of complex heterogeneous systems looking for the best tradeoffs among the different solutions. The basic idea is to combine the hardware and software design cycles. This article shows how knowledge-based techniques can be used to solve the hardware-software partitioning problem, the co-design task that makes the decision on the best implementation of the different components of a digital system. In particular, a fuzzy-logic-based expert system, SHAPES, has been developed based on the CommonKADS methodology. This tool takes advantage of two important artificial intelligence bases: the use of an expert's knowledge in the decision-making process and the possibility of dealing with imprecise and usually uncertain values by the definition of fuzzy magnitudes.