Fast Design-Space Exploration Method for SW/HW Codesign on FPGAs

This paper presents an efficient design-space exploration method to identify the Pareto solution for the relation between the execution time and the hardware area. Initially, our method takes a particular system mapping that is surely in the Pareto solution, and then repeats the local search and the update of the Pareto solution until the Pareto solution reaches a steady state. Compared to genetic-algorithm-based methods, we found that our method outputs the Pareto solution with a smaller number of explorations for larger design spaces.