HW/SW codesign for automotive applications: challenges on the architecture level

The latest generations of road vehicles have seen a tremendous development in onboard electronic systems, which control increasingly large parts of the vehicle´s functionality. HW/SW codesign techniques seem very useful for designing the nodes of the onboard computer network, and it is tempting also to apply it to the level of the overall electronic architecture. The paper discusses the differences and similarities of codesign on the node level and architecture level, and identifies some reasons why traditional assumptions of HW/SW codesign will not work when developing the complete architecture. It also outlines a suitable approach for the architecture level, based on techniques from the area of systems engineering