• 1 Département d’informatique Université Badji-Mokhtar

Partitioning of system functionality for implementation among multiple system components, such as among hardware and software components in codesign, is becoming an increasingly important topic. Various heuristics are used in automatic partitioning. In this paper, we present our tool, called AutoDec, implemented in Visual C++ 6.0. We verified that hierarchical clustering algorithm, based on closeness metrics, can be used to merge pieces of functionality before applying Kernighan/Lin algorithm, resulting in reduced execution time with often improvements in quality. In addition, we show that our approach, when used in partitioning, fills the gap between fast algorithms and highly-optimizing ones.