System design is undergoing a series of radical transformations to meet performance, quality, safety, cost and time-to-market constraints introduced by the pervasive use of electronics in everyday objects. An essential component of the new system design paradigm is the orthogonalization of concerns, i.e., the separation of the various aspects of design to allow more effective exploration of alternative solutions. Since the mask set and design cost for Deep Sub-Micron implementations is predicted to be overwhelming, it is important to find common architectures that can support a variety of applications. In this talk, we will explore methods for selecting families of software and hardware architectures that allow a substantial design re-use and some paradigms for embedded system designs that are likely to become the pillars of future tools and flows.