The unbelievable growth in the complexity of computer systems poses a difficult challenge on system design. To cope with these problems, new methodologies are needed that allow the reuse of existing designs in a hierarchical manner, and at the same time let the designer work on the highest possible abstraction level. Such reusable building blocks are called components in the software world and IP (intellectual property) blocks in the hardware world. Based on the similarity between these two notions the authors propose a new system-level design methodology, called component-based hardware-software co-design, which allows rapid prototyping and functional simulation of complex hardware-software systems. Moreover, a tool is presented supporting the new design methodology and a case study is shown to demonstrate the applicability of the concepts.
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