Often referred to as an Architect's workbench, the Space Studio Tool Suite proposes state-of-the-art features including electronic system-level design and simulation, architectural exploration, system-level partitioning and component mapping, debugging, monitoring and system generation into a single development environment.

The new release of the Space Studio Tool Suite (version 1.6) performs a Hw/Sw co-synthesis process in 3 steps:

1. Embedded Software generation done automatically by Space Studio (including the RTOS generation)
2. Hardware synthesis of user processes achieved inside Space Studio through an interface with Catapult from Mentor Graphics that transforms timed functional models into fully timed RTL models.
3. Communication synthesis done automatically by Space Studio

Do not miss this year at DAC 2010 a user track paper showing the potential of combining Space Studio and Catapult:

A. Dion, E. Boutillon, V. Calmettes, E. Liegon, Hardware/Software Co-Design Experience for Onboard Satellite Navigation Receiver

This chapter untitled "Codesign Experiences Based on a Virtual Platform" presents the Space Codesign methodology based on four main steps: system specification, exploration, analysis, and integration. All these features are illustrated through the JPEG decoder application by refining its specification from reference code to an implementation