Separation of concerns: overhead in modeling and efficient simulation techniques

Separating the description of important aspects of a design such as behavior and architecture, or computation and communication, may yield significant advantages in design time as well as in re-usability of the design. However, exploiting fully the re-usability opportunities offered by this approach implies to keep the various aspects of the design separated while verifying the design at a given level of abstraction. In particular, simulation of the design may undergo significant overhead versus a traditional approach where the design is represented and analyzed monolithically. In this paper, we present a few techniques that eliminate almost entirely the overhead while maintaining the positive aspects of the separation of concerns. Experimental results on a complex design back this assertion.