This book presents the perspective of the ADRIATIC project for thedesign of reconfigurable systems-on-chip, as perceived in the course of theresearch during 2001 - 2004. The project provided: (a) a high-levelhardware/software co-design and co-verification methodology and tools forreconfigurable systems-on-chip, supplemented with back-end design toolsfor the implementation of the reconfigurable logic blocks of the chip, (b) thedefinition of the technological requirements for reconfigurable processorsfor wireless terminals and (c) the implementation of MPEG-4, WCDMA andWLAN design cases to validate the methodology and tools.Reconfigurability is becoming an important part of System-on-Chip(SoC) design to cope with the increasing demands for simultaneousflexibility and computational power. Current hardware/software co-designmethodologies provide little support for dealing with the additional designdimension introduced. Further support at the system-level is needed for theidentification and modelling of dynamically re-configurable function blocks,for efficient design space exploration, partitioning and mapping, and forperformance evaluation. The overhead effects, e.g. context switching andconfiguration data, should be included in the modelling already at thesystem-level in order to produce credible information for decision-making.This book focuses on hardware/software co-design applied forreconfigurable SoCs. We discuss exploration of additional requirementsdue to reconfigurability, repor t extensions t o two C+ + basedlanguages/methodologies, SystemC and OCAPI-XL, to support thoserequirements, and present results of three case studies in the wireless andmultimedia communication domain that were used for the validation of theapproaches.The book includes nine chapters, divided in three parts: Part A containsChapters 1 – 3 and provides an introduction to reconfigurable systems-onchip;Part B contains Chapters 4 – 6 and describes in detail the proposedsystem level design methodology and the associated tools; Part C, whichcontains Chapters 7 – 9, provides the details of applying the proposedmethodology in practice.