Introduction

Abstract

System-on-Chips (SoC) are ubiquitous nowadays. They integrate an increasingly large number of hardware and software components on a single chip. The development of such complex systems is very challenging, especially within todays tight time-to-market constraints. To cope with this rising complexity, the level of abstraction is raised beyond the Register Transfer Level (RTL) to the Electronic System Level (ESL) [BMP07]. A higher level of abstraction allows for easier exploration of design alternatives and facilitates the parallel development and integration of hardware and software components.