In today's embedded processors, performance and flexibility have become the two key attributes. These attributes are often conflicting. The best performance is obtained from custom designed integrated circuits. In contrast, the maximum flexibility is delivered by a general purpose processor. Among the architecture types emerged over the past years to strike an optimum balance between these two attributes, two are prominent. The first ones are Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA)-based

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... res and the second ones are Applicationspecific Instruction-set Processors (ASIPs). Depending on the type of application (i.e. stream-like or control-dominated) either one of the abovementioned architecture types is able to deliver high performance or flexibility or both. Consequently, a new design approach with partial re-configurability on the application-specific processor is attracting strong research interest. We call this architecture reconfigurable ASIP (rASIP). Currently, the lack of a high-level abstraction of the rASIP limits the designer from trying out various design alternatives because of long and tedious exploration cycles. To address this issue, in this paper, a high-level specification for reconfigurable processors is proposed. Furthermore, a seamless design space exploration methodology using this specification is proposed.