Specification and design methodology has seen significant growth as a research area over the last decade, tracking but lagging behind VLSI design technology in general and the CAD industry in particular. The commercial rush to market tries to leverage existing technology which fuels CAD design tool development. Paralleling this is very active basic and applied research to investigate and move forward rational and effective methodologies for accomplishing digital design, especially in the field of hardware/software codesign. It is this close relationship between industry and academia that makes close cooperation between researchers and practitioners so important-and monographs like this that combine both abstract concept and pragmatic implementation deftly bridge this often gaping chasm. It was at the IEEE/ACM Eighth International Symposium on Hardware/Software Codesign where I met the author of this monograph, Dr. Randall Janka, who was presenting some of his recent dissertation research results on specification and design methodology, or as he has so succinctly defined this sometimes ambiguous concept, "the tools and rules." Where so many codesign researchers are trying to prove out different aspects of codesign and using toy applications to do so, Dr. Janka had developed a complete specification and design methodology and prototyped the infrastructure-and proven its viability, utility, and effectiveness using a demanding real-world application of a real-time synthetic aperture radar imaging processor that was implemented with embedded parallel processors.

This is the first book on embedded systems to offer a unified approach to hardware and software specification and design issues -- and the first to outline a new specify-explore-refine paradigm that is presently being used in industry in an ad-hoc manner, but until now has not been formally described. The book addresses the system design methodology from conceptualization to manufacturing using this new paradigm, and shows how this methodology can result in 10x improvement in productivity. Addresses two of the most significant topics in the design of digital systems -- executable system specification and a methodology for system partitioning and refinement into system-level components. Covers models and architectures; specification languages; a specification example; translation to VHDL; system partitioning; design quality estimation; specification refinement into synthesizable models; and system-design methodology and environment. Contains a complete specification of a model product (telephone answering machine), and demonstrates how to write the specification from an English description. For RISC design methodologists and VHDL methodologists; and CAD software developers.

As almost no other technology, embedded systems is an essential element of many innovations in automotive engineering. New functions and improvements of already existing functions, as well as the compliance with traffic regulations and customer requirements, have only become possible by the increasing use of electronic systems, especially in the fields of driving, safety, reliability, and functionality. Along with the functionalities that increase in number and have to cooperate, the complexity of the entire system will increase. Synergy effects resulting from distributed application functionalities via several electronic control devies, exchanging information through the network brings about more complex system architectures with many different sub-networks, operating with different velocities and different protocol implementations. To manage the increasing complexity of these systems, a deterministic behaviour of the control units and the communication network must be provided for, in particular when dealing with a distributed functionality. From Specification to Embedded Systems Application documents recent approaches and results presented at the International Embedded Systems Symposium (IESS 2005), which was held in August 2005 in Manaus (Brazil) and sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP). The topics which have been chosen for this working conference are very timely: design methodology, modeling, specification, software synthesis, power management, formal verification, testing, network, communication systems, distributed control systems, resource management and special aspects in system design.

Organized as an introduction followed by several self-contained chapters, this tutorial takes the reader from use cases to complete architectures for real-time embedded systems using SysML, UML, and MARTE and shows how to apply the COMET/RTE design method to real-world problems. --

The complexity of most real-time and embedded systems often exceeds that of other types of systems since, in addition to the usual spectrum of problems inherent in software, they need to deal with the complexities of the physical world. That world—as the proverbial Mr. Murphy tells us—is an unpredictable and often unfriendly place. Consequently, there is a very strong motivation to investigate and apply advanced design methods and technologies that could simplify and improve the reliability of real-time software design and implementation. As a result, from the first versions of UML issued in the mid 1990’s, designers of embedded and real-time systems have taken to UML with vigour and enthusiasm. However, the dream of a complete, model-driven design flow from specification through automated, optimised code generation, has been difficult to realise without some key improvements in UML semantics and syntax, specifically targeted to the real-time systems problem. With the enhancements in UML that have been proposed and are near standardisation with UML 2. 0, many of these improvements have been made. In the Spring of 2003, adoption of a formalised UML 2. 0 specification by the members of the Object Management Group (OMG) seems very close. It is therefore very appropriate to review the status of UML as a set of notations for embedded real-time systems - both the state of the art and best practices achieved up to this time with UML of previous generations - and where the changes embodied in the 2.

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.

This book is the latest contribution to the Chip Design Languages series and it consists of selected papers presented at the Forum on Specifications and Design Languages (FDL'06), in September 2006. The book represents the state-of-the-art in research and practice, and it identifies new research directions. It highlights the role of specification and modelling languages, and presents practical experiences with specification and modelling languages.