Hardware-software codesign has become a strategic technology for modern electronic systems, from single VLSI chips containing embedded cores to large distributed systems made of a heterogeneous network of processors communicating via sophisticated protocols. Codesign is the key enabling technology but may also be the bottleneck for faster progress in digital systems, especially signal processing ones.

In a roundtable held last June in Las Vegas at the Design Automation Conference, participants looked at the problems, methodologies, strategies, and future of codesign.

D&T thanks participants David Agnew (Bell-Northern Research), Rolf Ernst (Technical University of Braunschweig), Randolph E. Harr (DARPA/ETO), Vijay Nagasamy (VSIS, Inc.), Pierre Paulin (SGS-Thomson), Jerry S. Sullivan (Design Technologies), Hiroto Yasuura (Kyushu University). Our moderator was Daniel D. Gajski (University of California, Irvine). Robert P. Larsen (UC, Irvine) and D&T Editor-in-Chief Ken Wagner also attended.

ACM SIGDA sponsored the roundtable, and the Design Automation Conference provided the facilities. Kaushik Roy (Purdue University and D&T's Roundtable editor) organized the event.