Software Engineering for Embedded Systems: Chapter 2. Embedded Systems Hardware/Software Co-Development

When planning the development of modern embedded systems, hardware and software cannot be considered independently. Over the last two decades chip and system complexity has seen an enormous amount of growth, while more and more system functionality has moved from dedicated hardware implementation into software executing on general-purposed embedded processors. By 2010 the development effort for software had outgrown the development efforts for hardware, and the complexity trend continues in favor of software. Traditional design techniques such as independent hardware and software design are being challenged due to heterogeneous models and applications being integrated to create a complex system on chip. Using proper techniques of hardware-software codesign, designers consider the trade-offs in the way hardware and software components of a system work together to exhibit a specified behavior, given a set of performance goals and technology. This chapter will cover these topics.