Complex systems-on-chip are designed by interconnecting pre-designed hardware and software components. During the design cycle, a global model of the SoC may be composed of hardware and software models at different abstraction levels. Designing hardware/software interfaces to interconnect SoC component is a source of design bottlenecks. This paper describes a service-based model enabling systematic design and co-simulation of hardware/software interfaces for SoC design. This model, called Service Dependency Graph (SDG) allows modeling of complex, customized (application-specific) interfaces. We also present a model generator that can automatically build hardware/software interfaces based on service and resource requirements described by the SDG. This approach has been applied successfully on the design of a Software Defined Radio application. The results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach in modeling complex interfaces.
