For decades, software middlewares have tackled with the heterogeneity and interconnectivity roblems in computer networks with success. These problems are recurrent in the design of complex systems-on chip with a large number of components of different nature (including SW and HW modules). In this paper we present an object- oriented communication engine (OOCE) based on the architectural concepts used in software middlewares that unifies the inter-communication interface for both HW and SW elements. The infrastructure provided by the OOCE introduces a low-overhead abstraction layer that can be easily used to implement several parallel programming models. An implementation of this approach has been made for the Xilinx-V2Pro platform.