Hardware-software co-design: Tools for architecting systems-on-a-chip

This paper examines the issues and progress in the design of highly integrated microelectronic systems. These microsystems rely on an array of diverse components such as processors, memory, network interfaces, graphics and DSP 'cores'. In particular, we discuss problems in the combined design of hardware and software for these systems. We present a decomposition of the co-design problem, and identify the needed technologies in specification/modeling, synthesis and validation for efficient and error-free system designs. Co-design tools along with domain-specific design methodologies provide a key advantage to the system integrator in building complex single-chip systems. We illustrate this point in the specific area of architectural evaluation using co-simulation tools.