Modal processes: towards enhanced retargetability through control composition of distributed embedded systems

To explore different points in the design space of an embeddedsystem, it is important to be able to compose a designfrom reusable design components, and then map the resultingsystem description onto several possible target architectureswith different partitionings of functionality. Today's specificationmodels support composition styles that work well fordata communication but not for control communication betweenconcurrent processes to be mapped onto a distributedarchitecture. We propose a new retargetable system specificationmodel that combines the best properties of process-basedand hierarchical-FSM-based methods for modular compositionof data and control. The model lends itself to automatedsynthesis of the run-time system for coordinating tasks ondifferent processors in the system. The model and synthesismethod are illustrated with several examples of embeddedsystems.

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