Abstract: Hardware/software (HW/SW) partitioning is a critical step in the design of complex embedded system. The computing models and the corresponding algorithms for hardware/software partitioning reported in recent years are summarized. The HW/SW partitioning is modeled as a variety of knapsack problems with different constraints, where items in knapsack problems correspond to the blocks in partitioning problems, and the communication cost between blocks is considered. Both exact algorithms and heuristic ones are introduced based on different computing models. Some potential problems on research are listed for future work.