The allocation problem in hardware design

In the synthesis of hardware structures different design steps are solved by combinatorial optimization techniques. For one optimization step a scheduled flow graph is examined and it is determined, if operations can be assigned to the same processor. The search for a minimum number of processors is equivalent to the search for a minimum coloring of the corresponding incompatibility graph. For the general case and some special cases the graph classes of these incompatibility graphs are determined and for each class an optimal algorithm or an approximate heuristic is given.