HW/SW Co-design of Embedded Systems

The architecture of systems tailored for a specific application frequently requires cooperation among hardware and software components. The design of these systems is typically a compromise among a number of factors: cost, performance, size, development time, power consumption, etc. To cope with increasing possibilities offered by nowadays integration technology and steady demanding of shorter time-to-market, a comprehensive strategy aiming at gathering all the involved aspects of the design is becoming mandatory. This new discipline, called codesign, considers in a concurrent manner all the activities involved in the design of a mixed hw/sw dedicated system: capturing of design specification and requirements, mapping of the design onto hardware and software domains, system synthesis and design verification. The paper introduces the key factors involved in the design of an embedded system, together with a description on how codesign is overcoming such problems, opening the way to a new generation of CAD frameworks supporting system-level design.