Actor-Oriented Models for Codesign

Most current hardware engineering practice is deeply rooted in discrete-event modeling and synchronous design. Most current software engineering is deeply rooted in procedural abstractions. The latter says little about concurrency and temporal properties, whereas the former lacks many of modularity capabilities of modern programming languages. Actor-oriented design emphasizes concurrency and communication between components while maintaining modularity. Components called actors execute and communicate with other actors. In contrast to the interfaces in object-oriented design (methods, principally, which mediate transfer of the locus of control), interfaces in actor-oriented design (which we call ports) mediate communication. But the communication is not assumed to involve a transfer of control. This paper discusses the structure of actor-oriented models and shows how data and behavioral type systems enhance modularity and re-use potential while enabling designs that embrace concurrency and time. This paper shows how components can be designed for re-use through parameterization and behavioral polymorphism, and how component specialization can offset the performance costs of doing so.

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