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It is predicted that, in the next years, wireless sensor networks could be massively deployed in a wide variety of application areas, such as agriculture, logistics, automation, or infrastructure monitoring. An extremely low power consumption, high dependability, and low cost are common requirements for sensor nodes in all these applications. This can be achieved only by tiny, power-efficient microcontrollers and communication systems integrated on a single chip. Formal description techniques, such as SDL (Specification and Description Language), are suitable to formally prove properties of models designed in these languages. Code generators facilitate the automatic transformation of SDL models into software implementations, while preserving the properties of the model and, thus, achieving high system dependability. The implementations consist of the translated state machine behavior and, additionally, require a run-time environment for model execution. The objective of this work was to investigate an integrated design flow for embedded systems, which should allow the development of efficient and dependable system implementations from abstract SDL specifications. In this thesis, concepts for minimal SDL run-time environment have been devised and realized by an example implementation. Not only pure software implementations should be considered, but starting from these also the hardware/software (HW/SW) partitioning of the system should be supported. For this purpose, a cosimulation framework that allows the coupling of an instruction set simulator (ISS) with a functional SDL simulation has been investigated and prototypically implemented within the scope of this thesis. By shifting functionality to dedicated hardware components it is possible to take computational load from the microcontroller and to decrease the overall energy consumption by reducing the clock frequency and lowering the supply voltage. Due to the use of SDL, the design flow lends itself particularly to the implementation of communication protocols, and is limited to applications with soft real-time requirements. For an SDL-based design flow targeted to resource-constrained embedded systems, concepts and real implementations of minimal SDL run-time environments were lacking. Available software tools, indeed, enable the transformation of SDL models into C code, however for an efficient implementation, an integration into existing real-time operating systems (RTOS) for small microcontrollers is essential. A prototypical implementation of a run-time library for the Reflex RTOS has been created to validate our general concepts. It is about 30 % faster and consumes less than half of the program memory compared to the operating system independent run-time environment of the tool vendor Telelogic. For simple SDL models, the application requires in total less than 8 kbytes program memory and 1 kbyte RAM. For the evaluation of design alternatives that realize different hardware/software partitionings, instruction set simulators are particularly suitable. They facilitate the identification of performance bottlenecks of the HW/SW system. Test stimuli are required in order to measure the performance and response time of systems under design. The development of an environment that generates such test signals can be a laborious task. Thus, it is reasonable, especially in the design of protocols, to use an SDL simulation of a communication network to generate these test stimuli. Such an SDL model already exists and is the basis for the implementation. The protocol implementation simulated by the ISS then becomes part of the network simulation. An efficient coupling of SDL simulations with instruction set simulators had to be investigated, and a solution is presented in this thesis. Based on the general concepts, a cosimulation framework for the ISS TSIM for the LEON2 processor was realized by the author. The joint SDL and instruction set simulation is very fast, which could be demonstrated by connecting a software implementation of the complex IEEE 802.15.3 medium access control (MAC) protocol with an SDL simulation of a network consisting of four devices. The real execution time for 10 seconds of simulation time amounted to just 50 seconds. The overall design flow was validated by means of a HW/SW implementation of the IEEE 802.15.3 wireless MAC protocol. The author designed a complete SDL model of the protocol and integrated it into Reflex. By using our cosimulation environment for the TSIM simulator, the model was partitioned into hardware and software. For the hardware part, a dedicated protocol accelerator was designed by the author. This hardware component was integrated on a single chip with the LEON2 processor and, finally, manufactured. It could be shown that the presented methodology enables the design and implementation of efficient HW/SW systems. Consequently, it can be applied to the development of dependable and energy-efficient wireless sensor nodes and other embedded systems.