Design models and steps for codesign

Increasingly, modern electronic systems are required to be mixed hardware/software systems. Traditional system development techniques do not cope with the needs of complex systems, and in particular with rapidly changing requirements under time-to-market pressure. Hardware/Software codesign techniques offer considerable help in that they allow one to view an application as a flexible composition of properly encapsulated hardware and software components. Some of these components could be existing adaptable and reusable library components. The paper addresses the problem of hardware/software codesign when starting at the system-level. The input is a functional specification given in an executable language such as SDL. The codesign involves a number of interactive steps leading to an implementation composed of hardware and software components. The design decisions and refinement steps are made using an intermediate form called Solar