Chip designers face increasingly complex designs and multiple competing design objectives and constraints. Early in the design cycle, a designer has to make choices relying on insufficient or inaccurate information. For instance, the designer has to decide which parts to implemen
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Chip designers face increasingly complex designs and multiple competing design objectives and constraints. Early in the design cycle, a designer has to make choices relying on insufficient or inaccurate information. For instance, the designer has to decide which parts to implement in software and which in hardware. The complexity of the designs render it impossible for a human to make a sound decision. The number of options and the pace with which they change is simply overwhelming. This thesis describes a high-level design method to solve this problem. The design method and the newly developed tools have been used successfully in the design of an OFDM transceiver. The results can be used to explore the design space of the transceiver. Based on this exploration, a qualitative comparison of the alternative implementations is possible. This gives the designer sufficient information to make well-founded decisions.