How do you approach hardware-software co-design for embedded systems?

Co-design optimizes hardware and software together for system requirements. Process: Define system requirements and constraints, Partition functionality between HW/SW based on performance, power, flexibility, and cost trade-offs, Create virtual platform for early software development, Iterate design based on profiling. HW acceleration for: High-throughput computation, Low-latency operations, and Power-critical functions. Techniques: Algorithmic exploration (fixed-point vs floating), Hardware-software interface design (registers, DMA, interrupts), Transaction-level modeling (SystemC), and FPGA prototyping. Modern SoCs blur boundaries with configurable accelerators, programmable DSPs, and custom instructions.