A Unified Representation for Hardware and Software

From this point forward, the discussion will focus on hardware/software modeling. As a point of departure, this chapter presents a unified representation [245] for hardware and software. The first section reviews the benefits of a unified representation. The next section introduces some pertinent modeling concepts, concentrating on two in particular: level of abstraction and level of interpretation. Both abstraction level and interpretation level affect the amount of detail present within a model. A unified representation is developed which incorporates descriptions based on either functional abstractions or data abstractions and integrates the modeling concepts mentioned above. This representation serves as the foundation for models that utilize data/control flow concepts (Chapter 7/Chapter 8) and object-oriented techniques (Chapter 9).