Low product life cycle, high non-recurring expenses and increasing development costs is forcing product makers to design more and more complex chips. Today's product market demands hardware with high performance, higher functionality, smaller form factor and lower power consution. This has led to adoption of rapidly changing technologies such as systems-on-chip with multiple core architectures, multiple architectures within a single device, multi-layered bus architectures, higher clock frequencies to name a few. The challenge for VLSI and System designers is to optimise the hardware-software integration for lowest total cost of acquisition of products. Need for the use of right processes and methods is much more today than ever before when the cost of system design is becoming higher and the cost of re-work even higher. What does it take for design service companies to meet the challenges of embedded product development?