Aspects on system-level design

There are probably as many descriptions of system-level design as there are system designers and codesign researchers. To define or even try to describe system-level design in a few paragraphs is not an easy task. However, the early stages of any system design effort have a few characteristics in common and two of the most important are incompleteness and exploration. We discuss some aspects related to the exploration of incompletely described electronic systems and indicate areas that deserve attention. The discussion is based on our industrial experience and it is important to understand that not all the requirements on system-level design come from the application domain itself. Rather they depend heavily on the economical and organisational context in which systems are developed.