In this paper we investigate the application of the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) technique for solving the Hardware/Software partitioning problem. The PSO is attractive for the Hardware/Software partitioning problem as it offers reasonable coverage of the design space together with O(n) main loop's execution time, where n is the number of proposed solutions that will evolve to provide the final solution. We carried out several tests on a hypothetical, relatively-large Hardware/Software partitioning problem using the PSO algorithm as well as the Genetic Algorithm (GA), which is another evolutionary technique. We found that PSO outperforms GA in the cost function and the execution time. For the case of unconstrained design problem, we tested several hybrid combinations of PSO and GA algorithms; including PSO then GA, GA then PSO, GA followed by GA, and finally PSO followed by PSO. We found that a PSO followed by GA algorithm gives small or no improvement at all, while a GA then PSO algorithm gives the same results as the PSO alone. The PSO algorithm followed by another PSO round gave the best result as it allows another round of domain exploration. The second PSO round assign new randomized velocities to the particles, while keeping best particle positions obtained in the first round. We propose to name this successive PSO algorithm as the Re-excited PSO algorithm.
