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Since the software part in today's designs is increasingly important, the impact of platform decisions with respect to the hardware and the software infrastructure (OS, scheduler, priorities, mapping) has to be explored in early design phases.In this paper, we present an extension of the existing SystemC TM -based OSSS design flow regarding software multi-tasking in system models. The simulation of the OSSS software run-time model supports different scheduling policies, as well as efficient timing annotations, and deadlines. Inter-task communication is modelled via userdefined Shared Objects. The impact of timing annotation granularity on the achievable simulation performance is studied. As a result, a lazy synchronisation scheme is proposed, that is based on omitting SystemC time synchronisations, that do not have observable effects on the application model.

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Today's heterogeneous embedded systems combine components from different domains, such as software, analogue hardware and digital hardware. The design and implementation of these systems is still a complex and error-prone task due to the different Models of Computations (MoCs), design languages and tools associated with each of the domains. Though making such systems adaptive is technologically feasible, most of the current design methodologies do not explicitely support adaptive architectures. This paper present the ANDRES project. The main objective of ANDRES is the development of a seamless design flow for adaptive heterogeneous embedded systems (AHES) based on the modelling language SystemC. Using domain-specific modelling extensions and libraries, ANDRES will provide means to efficiently use and exploit adaptivity in embedded system design. The design flow is completed by a methodology and tools for automatic hardware and software synthesis for adaptive architectures.

The consideration of an embedded device’s power consumption and its management is increasingly important nowadays. Currently, it is not easily possible to integrate power information already during the platform exploration phase. In this paper, we discuss the design challenges of today’s heterogeneous HW/SW systems regarding power and complexity, both for platform vendors as well as system integrators. As a result, we propose a reference framework and design flow concept that combines system-level power optimization techniques with platform-based rapid prototyping. Virtual executable prototypes are generated from MARTE/UML and functional C/C++ descriptions, which then allows to study different platforms, mapping alternatives, and power management strategies. Our proposed flow combines system-level timing and power estimation techniques available in commercial tools with platform-based rapid prototyping. We propose an efficient code annotation technique for timing and power properties enabling fast host execution as well as adaptive collection of power traces. Combined with a flexible design-space exploration (DSE) approach our flow allows a trade-off analysis between different platforms, mapping alternatives, and optimization techniques, based on domain-specific workload scenarios. The proposed framework and design flow has been implemented in the COMPLEX FP7 European integrated project