Journal of Electronic Systems Luigi Pomante 3 2 2013 http://www.dline.info/jes/fulltext/v3n2/4.pdf This work faces the problem of the HW/SW co-design of dedicated systems based on heterogeneous parallel architectures. In particular, it proposes an extension of a previous system-level design space exploration (DSE) approach able to suggest to the designer an HW/SW partitioning of the application specification and a mapping of the partitioned entities onto an automatically selected heterogeneous multi-processors architecture where each processor could be also homogeneous multi-core. The extended modeling strategy and the description of the adopted heuristic/metrics represent the core of the paper