A Comparative Evaluation of Models and Specification Languages for Embedded System Design

The HW/SW Codesign approach in the design of embedded systems and their increasing complexity has turned the need of simplifying the specification of both the desired behaviour and the final implementation a very crucial task in the design process. Towards this effort programmers and designers have introduced a plethora of model-specification language pairs that can effectively reduce the complexity of the captured functionality, raise the level of abstraction and support several design tasks (such as verification, performance estimation etc). Due to the lack of a set of well-defined features for the comparative evaluation of those pairs industry is still reluctant in taking advantage of their full potential. Additionally, design teams are introducing new models and specification languages which sometimes add nothing new to already existing ones. Although VSIA’ s [13] model taxonomy has been proven very useful in classifying models for the specification of the system’s implementation our approach deals with the specification of the initial desired behaviour. By introducing two evaluation axes for models, introducing a 3 dimensional space for the taxonomy of specification languages and classifying the latter with respect to the model they are used to express, we present a complete feature-based approach that can be used not only for the selection of the most appropriate model-specification language pair for the design at hand but also for the classification and evaluation of new models and specification languages introduced for embedded system design.

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