Partitioning for hardware-accelerated functional verification

A circuit design is partitioned for hardware-accelerated functional verification using a directed hypergraph with edge weights that are a function of slack. Slack may be computed as the difference between the early and late ranks for the source of an edge. The weight may further be computed as the difference between the edge's slack and a maximum slack value. In a preferred implementation each vertex also has multiple weights associated with resource requirements of different node types, and the partitioning is constrained to prevent vertex movement that would result in vertex weights for a given partition exceeding a partition resource capacity based on the accelerator architecture. Edge and vertex weights can be recomputed for the next level of partitioning. The partitioning process can be repeatedly iteratively until a termination criterion is met, the termination criterion being based in part on the number of directed cuts in each of the partitions.