PARADISE stands for Design Environment for PARAllel and DIStributed Embedded Systems. It integrates on an open platform a variety of tools covering the entire design cycle for distributed embedded Systems. Abstract specifications are supported by the Abstract State Machine Workbench (ASM Workbench) from HNI which is a design environment of its own.The same is true for the SpecC environment from UCI that has been integrated as well. An alternative modeling tool is SEA from C-LAB which is based on Predicate/Transition nets.Design space exploration is carried out using the SSEA tool from ETH Zurich/University of Paderborn. With the aid of the ChaRy tool from C-LAB a partitioning based on precise timing calculations is carried out. It is closely interconnected to the STARC code generator for StateCharts from C-LAB. It generates code with guaranteed execution times. For processes running as software on programmable processors a dedicated RTOS is generated using the generator TEReCS based on a component library named DreaMS, both from HNI. Processes to be mapped on hardware are handled by the PMOSS tool from Technical University of Dresden/Univesity of T?bingen/University of Paderborn. In this paper especially aspects of modeling based on Pr/T-nets and aspects of the synthesis process for such models are discussed. The co-existence of asynchronous and synchronous modeling techniques will be pointed out and synthesis methods for both modeling paradigms will be discussed.