An efficient performance-driven approach for HW/SW Co-design

Nowadays embedded systems are powerful and everywhere. They implement complex functionality relying on a huge set of different hardware and software (HW/SW) architectures. In order to reduce their development effort, HW/SW Co-Design techniques are used during the entire development cycle. These techniques aim at helping designers to define a feasible hardware and software partitioning for the system in such a way that functional and non-functional requirements are fulfilled. In this context Design Space Exploration is a challenging activity since a huge number of different implementation alternatives need to be evaluated. By exploiting some intrinsic properties of the embedded system domain, in this paper we propose our vision for a novel Performance-Driven HW/SW Co-Design methodology. It combines: (i) the "design for verifiability" concept, suitable to model the system behaviour avoiding the state space explosion problem, and (ii) model-driven techniques to address performance issues. For this goal, we introduce the concepts underlying: (i) a novel formal modeling language and, (ii) a performance-driven verification/transformation chain.