The Delta project has the goal of developing a co-design framework supporting the design of heterogeneous embedded systems. The conceptual structure of the project is depicted in the figure below.

The complexity of the co-design approach enforces the composition of different and complementary tasks: identification of metrics and estimators, development of models, definition of methodologies, integration and tools implementation. Such tasks are represented in the figure as concentric sectors on each plane. The evolution of such tasks over time will lead to an improvement of models and methodologies, as well as the introduction of new features, better tool-chain integration oriented to the deployment of a pre-commercial prototype tools. To face the complexity and variety of available target platforms, the project will start from a well-defined architecture based on the Xilinx Virtex-II Pro FPGA integrating a PowerPC processor core. Such architecture allows studying the problems of platform configuration, concurrent design of hardware and software portions, communication and verification and is supported by the availability of a commercial development kit - the Xilinx EDK. The evolution of the project will gradually consider more and more complex, flexible and general platform-based architectures, supported by a set of well-established commercially available EDA tools.