Hardware-software co-design of embedded systems using CoWare´s N2C methodology for application development

The aim of this paper is to present the technology assessment of the N2C of CoWare inc. approach in the co-design/co-simulation problem. The test bench to be used is a telecommunication application implementing the Medium Access (MAC) layer and the RF-IF part of the Physical (PHY) layer of the DECT protocol stack. These are part of a single-chip solution for the baseband processor of a mobile phone. This approach will be evaluated in comparison with the current industrial practice. N2C technology aims to fill very specific gaps in existing tool platforms and more specifically: high-level system modeling, HW-SW co-simulation and interface generation. It also supports additional co-design tasks like partitioning and co-synthesis. The final goal of this assessment is to isolate and point out the actual industrial needs for co-design through the evaluation of N2C according to the above characteristics