The industry must put effort in defining standards for both functional and transactional levels for platform design to address the previous drawbacks. This standardization needs to lead to new methodologies required by the whole SoC design community to ensure a smooth path from specification to implementation. This paper reports a methodology and tool flow for SoC design-generalizing platform-based design concepts. This approach is based mainly on the refinement of the entire application from the functional model to the RTL one, permitting a model of the complete system at any time of the design process.