A Petri net model for hardware/software codesign

This work presents Petri nets as an intermediate model for hardware/softwar e codesign. The main reason of using of Petri nets is to provide a model th at allows for formal qualitative and quantitative analysis in order to perf orm hardware/software partitioning. Petri nets as an intermediate model all ows one to analyze properties of the specification and formally compute per formance indices which are used in the partitioning process. This paper hig hlights methods of computing load balance, mutual exclusion degree and comm unication cost of behavioral description in order to perform the initial al location and the partitioning. This work is also devoted to describing a me thod for estimating hardware area, and it also presents an overview of the general partitioning method considering multiple software components.