Prototyping networked embedded systems

Sophisticated consumer devices that support multimedia-personal digital assistants, network computers, and mobile communication devices-pose challenges for embedded systems designers. The low-cost, consumer-oriented, fast time-to-market mentality that dominates embedded system design today forces design teams to use hardware-software codesign to cope with growing design complexities. New codesign methodologies and tools must support a key characteristic of next-generation embedded systems: the capability to communicate over networks and adapt to different operating environments. The paper discusses two emerging classes of embedded systems: multifunction systems and multimode systems