Desirable performance of the system usually can not be reached by single application of the steps described above so these steps repeated in iterative manner.

Generally this iterative process (workflow) is controlled by performance estimation made after prototyping or combining steps. Some additional validation procedures can also be performed to assess correctness of code after retargeting or hardware instantiation.

In turn results of performance evaluation can force other features of the system to be taken into account during partitioning step.