Abstract This work faces the problem of the Electronic System-Level (ESL) HW/SW co-design of dedicated electronic digital systems based on heterogeneous multi-processor architectures. In particular, the work presents a prototype SystemC-based environment that exploits a Design Space Exploration (DSE) approach able to suggest an HW/SW partitioning of the system specification and a mapping onto an automatically defined architecture. The descriptions of the reference HW/SW co-design methodology and the main design issues related to the developed DSE SW tools, supported by two reference use cases that allows to understand the role of the DSE step in the whole design flow, represent the core of the paper.