7. Conclusion

In this article, we have presented an overview of the general principles and concepts used in the joint hardware/software design of systems-on-chip. These are undergoing continuous evolution, one of the major consequences of which is the growing complexity of both hardware and software, with increasing demands for performance and energy efficiency. Against this backdrop, the design challenge is enormous. That's why we've set out to review a number of notions useful in the construction of design approaches likely to meet this challenge. The presentation of these notions has been structured around the stages of a classic co-design flow. Among the possible observations, it seems to us that modeling, through the possibilities of abstraction, expressiveness, flexibility and reasoning it offers, is one of the important responses to the high complexity of today's systems. This explains the emergence...