Hardware/software (HW/SW) partitioning and scheduling are the crucial steps in HW/SW co-design. They have a strong effect on performance, area, power and the system itself. In this paper, a memory-reinforced tabu search algorithm with critical path awareness (MTSP) is proposed for solving the HW/SW partitioning problem. First, the critical path (CP) algorithm can locate the critical task queues and output a reduced task graph. Second, the solution to a heuristic algorithm (HA) is used as the initial solution. Third, by introducing hash technology, adding dual memory tables improves the search strength and effectiveness of the tabu search, and the experiment is completed by priority scheduling. MTSP especially has good performance in large task graphs, while it can greatly improve system performance, especially in the case of generating a large communication penalty. The experimental results show that the average improvement over the latest efficient hybrid algorithm is up to 5%. The improvement in algorithm searching time is 66% in comparison to the popular algorithms cited in this paper. INDEX TERMS Hardware/software partitioning, task graph, heuristic method, tabu search algorithm, MPSoC.