Managing large HW/SW Codesign projects

HW/SW Codesign [4] is a strategy to develop highly optimized systems composed of both electronics hardware and software. Examples are smartphones, consumer electronics or embedded systems. The challenge is to achieve an optimized split by partitioning the system components into hardware and software and to achieve the best project execution time (and cost) by developing both hardware and software concurrently [1]. If such systems contain hundreds of highly interdependent hardware and software components, the R&D project for such a system becomes large and very complex. Since more HW/SW systems are developed and since the complexity is growing, a specialized project management methodology for this kind of projects is emerging. Our contribution is focused on giving a practical overview of the challenges and best practices for the management of such projects. The findings are based on more than 10 years industrial experience with various large smartphone and consumer electronics projects. Currently, these findings are evaluated in a research project. This contribution gives an overview on the scope and future targets of this project.