HARWEST (HARdware/softWare co-dEsign for Scientific and Technological applications) is a four year research project funded by the Italian Ministry for the University and the Research.

Started on June 2005, it is aimed at creating an automatic HW/SW co-design environment, able to extract the parallelism from the input specifics (given by means of ANSI C programs) and to optimally choose which parts of the input program should be mapped onto parallel SW and which parts onto parallel HW. Both the parallel HW, described by means of VHDL programs, and the parallel SW are generated automatically by the HARWEST design tools. Also the interfaces among the different HW/SW portions are automatically generated.