Analysis step can be considered as the first codesign stage. Miscellaneous properties of the system have to be taken into account to clarify basic characteristics of core processor.

Source code as well as high-level specification of the system can be analyzed to determine its various properties such as presence or absence of floating-point arithmetic, parallelizm, decomposition into independent fragments etc.

As a result basic architectural decision is formulated. This decision states basic properties of the hardware: its type, its vendor, model, configuration etc.