Towards a theory for hardware/software codesign

This paper aims at a theory for hardware/software codesign. We approach this goal by investigating system design according to the allocation principle which is a systems engineering approach to mixed hardware/software systems design. The associated process steps are system-level design including partitioning and communication synthesis by channel mapping and binding. A strengthened system-level design and synthesis process makes codesign with delayed technology dependent partitioning possible. In addition we investigate possibilities for automating these processes by tool support