"Europe has a strong leadership in the domains of intelligent communications, multimedia, and automotive systems. However, the exponential increase in complexity threatens the European competitiveness. Current challenges when designing mixed HW/SW embedded systems are (1) mastering the complexity of the integration between the HW and the SW parts, (2) shortening time-to-market, and (3) reducing design cost. Codesign is the next big step in the holistic ( design of embedded electronic systems; hence it is an essential enabling technology for solving these challenges. It formalizes the interface between the hardware and software parts, and improves the amount of re-use, by allowing one to design models that can be adapted to several different performance/power/cost requirements and to different interface protocols. OSMOSIS will develop a key component required to maintain and enforce the European competitiveness in the intelligent system domains: create an open-source codesign framework for top-down embedded system design. This goal is achieved by joining the numerous on-going efforts in industry and academia into a unified best-practice, industrial-quality framework that will enable an easier transition from research results to industrial exploitation. The OSMOSIS platform will enable experimentation with codesign algorithms, starting from languages such as SystemC and producing HW and SW implementations. The results of the project will have a significant impact on intelligent embedded systems design by promoting cost-efficient software and hardware integration and reducing software/hardware concurrent development time. The consortium mobilizes a significant European force that covers the whole chain of embedded systems design: three embedded system design companies and silicon platform providers an arising research and development centre one of the largest European R&D centres and one prominent academic institution."