Horizontal and vertical HW/SW co-design flows for power aware smart card designs

This paper presents a HW/SW co-design methodology for the design of resource limited embedded devices. The design methodology takes advantage of system abstraction and attached vertical and horizontal co-design flows. The vertical co-design flow focuses on a system consisting of a standard processor and a custom hardware as co-processor. The horizontal co-design flow implements the system’s functionality entirely in software, but the underlying processor is developed at the same time. The focus of the paper is on the detailed description of the two design flows under the aspect of power awareness.