For the near future, the recent predictions and roadmaps of silicon semiconductor technology all agree that the number of transistors on a chip will keep growing exponentially according to Moore's Law, pushing technology towards the system-on-a-chip (SOC) era. However, we are increasingly experiencing a productivity gap where the chip complexity that can be handled by current design teams falls short of the possibilities offered by technological advances. Together with growing time-to-market pressures, this drives the need for innovative measures to increase design productivity by orders of magnitude. It is commonly agreed that the solutions for achieving such a leap in design productivity lie in a shift of the focus of the design process to higher levels of abstraction on the one hand and in the massive reuse of predesigned, complex system components (intellectual property, IP) on the other hand. In order to be successful, both concepts eventually require the adoption of new languages and methodologies for system design, backed-up by the availability of a corresponding set of system-level design automation tools. This book presents the SpecC system-level design language (SLDL) and the corresponding SpecC design methodology. The SpecC language is intended for specification and design of SOCs or embedded systems including software and hardware, whether using fixed platforms, integrating systems from different IPs, or synthesizing the system blocks from programming or hardware description languages. SpecC Specification Language and Methodology describes the SpecC methodology that leads designers from an executable specification to an RTL implementation through a well-defined sequence of steps. Each model is described and guidelines are given for generating these models from executable specifications. Finally, the SpecC methodology is demonstrated on an industrial-size example. The design community is now entering the system level of abstraction era and SpecC is the enabling element to achieve a paradigm shift in design culture needed for system/product design and manufacturing. SpecC Specification Language and Methodology will be of interest to researchers, designers, and managers dealing with system-level design, design flows and methodologies as well as students learning system specification, modeling and design.

Each model is described and guidelines are given for generating these models from executable specifications. Finally, the Spec C methodology is demonstrated on an industrial-size example. The design community is now entering the system level of abstraction era and Spec C is the enabling element to achieve a paradigm shift in design culture needed for system/product design and manufacturing.".

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed joint postproceedings of the satellite activities held at the 7th International Conference on the Unified Modeling Language, UML 2004, in Lisbon, Portugal in October 2004 complementing the main conference track. The book presents reports on the 10 workshops held at UML and covers a broad range of topics around systems modelling; these reports are compiled by the respective workshop organizers. Furthermore 12 revised reviewed papers from the industry track are included as well as 11 short papers corresponding to selected poster/demo presentations and a summary on the UML tools exhibition.

Este libro presenta los desafíos planteados por las nuevas y sumamente poderosas tecnologías de integración de sistemas electrónicos, que están en la base de los cambios sociales hacia lo que llaman la Sociedad de la Información; en la que los dispositivos electrónicos se harán una parte incorporada de la vida diaria, encajados en casi cada producto. Es necesario un conocimiento cuidadoso de los desafíos para aprovechar la amplia gama de ocasiones ofrecidas por tales capacidades de integración y las correspondientes posibilidades de diseño de sistemas electrónicos.

This book will explain how to verify SoC (Systems on Chip) logic designs using "formal and "semiformal verification techniques. The critical issue to be addressed is whether the functionality of the design is the one that the designers intended. Simulation has been used for checking the correctness of SoC designs (as in "functional verification), but many subtle design errors cannot be caught by simulation. Recently, formal verification, giving mathematical proof of the correctness of designs, has been gaining popularity.For higher design productivity, it is essential to debug designs as early as possible, which this book facilitates. This book covers all aspects of high-level formal and semiformal verification techniques for system level designs.• First book that covers all aspects of formal and semiformal, high-level (higher than RTL) design verification targeting SoC designs.• Formal verification of high-level designs (RTL or higher).• Verification techniques are discussed with associated system-level design methodology.

Increasing system complexity has created a pressing need for better design tools and associated methodologies and languages for meeting the stringent time to market and cost constraints. Platform-centric and platfo- based system-on-chip (SoC) design methodologies, based on reuse of software and hardware functionality, has also gained increasing exposure and usage within the Electronic System-Level (ESL) design communities. The book proposes a new methodology for realizing platform-centric design of complex systems, and presents a detailed plan for its implementation. The proposed plan allows component vendors, system integrators and product developers to collaborate effectively and efficiently to create complex products within budget and schedule constraints. This book focuses more on the use of platforms in the design of products, and not on the design of platforms themselves. Platform-centric design is not for everyone, as some may feel that it does not allow them to differentiate their offering from competitors to a significant degree. However, its proponents may claim that the time-- market and cost advantages of platform-centric design more than compensate for any drawbacks.

A tutorial approach to using the UML modeling language in system-on-chip design Based on the DAC 2004 tutorial, applicable for students and professionals Contributions by top-level international researchers The best work at the first UML for SoC workshop Unique combination of both UML capabilities and SoC design issues Condenses research and development ideas that are only found in multiple conference proceedings and many other books into one place Will be the seminal reference work for this area for years to come

The first of two volumes in the Electronic Design Automation for Integrated Circuits Handbook, Second Edition, Electronic Design Automation for IC System Design, Verification, and Testing thoroughly examines system-level design, microarchitectural design, logic verification, and testing. Chapters contributed by leading experts authoritatively discuss processor modeling and design tools, using performance metrics to select microprocessor cores for integrated circuit (IC) designs, design and verification languages, digital simulation, hardware acceleration and emulation, and much more. New to This Edition: Major updates appearing in the initial phases of the design flow, where the level of abstraction keeps rising to support more functionality with lower non-recurring engineering (NRE) costs Significant revisions reflected in the final phases of the design flow, where the complexity due to smaller and smaller geometries is compounded by the slow progress of shorter wavelength lithography New coverage of cutting-edge applications and approaches realized in the decade since publication of the previous edition—these are illustrated by new chapters on high-level synthesis, system-on-chip (SoC) block-based design, and back-annotating system-level models Offering improved depth and modernity, Electronic Design Automation for IC System Design, Verification, and Testing provides a valuable, state-of-the-art reference for electronic design automation (EDA) students, researchers, and professionals.

Due to the decreasing production costs of IT systems, applications that had to be realised as expensive PCBs formerly, can now be realised as a system-on-chip. Furthermore, low cost broadband communication media for wide area communication as well as for the realisation of local distributed systems are available. Typically the market requires IT systems that realise a set of specific features for the end user in a given environment, so called embedded systems. Some examples for such embedded systems are control systems in cars, airplanes, houses or plants, information and communication devices like digital TV, mobile phones or autonomous systems like service- or edutainment robots. For the design of embedded systems the designer has to tackle three major aspects: The application itself including the man-machine interface, The (target) architecture of the system including all functional and non-functional constraints and, the design methodology including modelling, specification, synthesis, test and validation. The last two points are a major focus of this book. This book documents the high quality approaches and results that were presented at the International Workshop on Distributed and Parallel Embedded Systems (DIPES 2000), which was sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP), and organised by IFIP working groups WG10.3, WG10.4 and WG10.5. The workshop took place on October 18-19, 2000, in Schloß Eringerfeld near Paderborn, Germany. Architecture and Design of Distributed Embedded Systems is organised similar to the workshop. Chapters 1 and 4 (Methodology I and II) deal with different modelling and specification paradigms and the corresponding design methodologies. Generic system architectures for different classes of embedded systems are presented in Chapter 2. In Chapter 3 several design environments for the support of specific design methodologies are presented. Problems concerning test and validation are discussed in Chapter 5. The last two chapters include distribution and communication aspects (Chapter 6) and synthesis techniques for embedded systems (Chapter 7). This book is essential reading for computer science researchers and application developers.

Embedded System Design: Modeling, Synthesis and Verification introduces a model-based approach to system level design. It presents modeling techniques for both computation and communication at different levels of abstraction, such as specification, transaction level and cycle-accurate level. It discusses synthesis methods for system level architectures, embedded software and hardware components. Using these methods, designers can develop applications with high level models, which are automatically translatable to low level implementations. This book, furthermore, describes simulation-based and formal verification methods that are essential for achieving design confidence. The book concludes with an overview of existing tools along with a design case study outlining the practice of embedded system design. Specifically, this book addresses the following topics in detail: . System modeling at different abstraction levels . Model-based system design . Hardware/Software codesign . Software and Hardware component synthesis . System verification This book is for groups within the embedded system community: students in courses on embedded systems, embedded application developers, system designers and managers, CAD tool developers, design automation, and system engineering.