Date Added: Mar 2011
Embedded systems are used all over the society. Current estimates indicate that over 90 percent of worldwide computers are embedded systems. As the complexity of system design increases, use of pre-designed components, provides an effective way to reduce the complexity of synthesized hardware. Hardware-Software co-synthesis is the process of partitioning an embedded system specification into hardware and software modules in order to meet performance, power consumption and cost goals. While the design problem of systems that contain processors and ASIC chips is not new, computer aided synthesis of such heterogeneous or mixed systems poses challenging problems because of the differences in model and rate of computation by application-specific hardware and processor software.