Architecture description languages for programmable embedded systems

P. Mishra, N. Dutt
2005 IEE Proceedings - Computers and digital Techniques  
Embedded systems present a tremendous opportunity to customise designs by exploiting the application behaviour. Shrinking time-to-market, coupled with short product lifetimes, create a critical need for rapid exploration and evaluation of candidate architectures. Architecture description languages (ADL) enable exploration of programmable architectures for a given set of application programs under various design constraints such as area, power and performance. The ADL is used to specify
more » ... ble embedded systems, including processor, coprocessor and memory architectures. The ADL specification is used to generate a variety of software tools and models facilitating exploration and validation of candidate architectures. The paper surveys the existing ADLs in terms of (a) the inherent features of the languages and (b) the methodologies they support to enable simulation, compilation, synthesis, test generation and validation of programmable embedded systems. It concludes with a discussion of the relative merits and demerits of the existing ADLs and expected features of future ADLs.
doi:10.1049/ip-cdt:20045071 fatcat:sznyga75n5hk3pongpmyrmffgq