Not really directly connected, but in embedded systems you can actually see a lot of hardware software codesign approaches. There is an approach called NISC [1

Not really directly connected, but in embedded systems you can actually see a lot of hardware software codesign approaches. There is an approach called NISC [1] (No Instruction Set Computer), where the instruction set is completely removed and the compiler generates control words directly for the architecture (which can also be designed from scratch and optimized). [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NISC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NISC