Models in system design follow the general tendency in electronics in terms of size, complexity and difficulty of maintenance. While a model should be a manageable representation of a system, this increasing complexity sometimes forces current CAD-tool designers and model writers to apply modeling techniques to the model itself. Model writers are interested in instrumenting their model, so as to extract critical information before the model is complete. CAD tools designers use internal representations of the design at various stages. The complexity has also led CAD-tool developers to develop...

Co-Design is the set of emerging techniques which allows for the simultaneous design of Hardware and Software. In many cases where the application is very demanding in terms of various performances (time, surface, power consumption), trade-offs between dedicated hardware and dedicated software are becoming increasingly difficult to decide upon in the early stages of a design. Verification techniques - such as simulation or proof techniques - that have proven necessary in the hardware design must be dramatically adapted to the simultaneous verification of Software and Hardware.
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The VITAL specification addresses the issues of interoperability, backannotation and high performance simulation for sign-off quality ASIC libraries in VHDL. VITAL provides modeling guidelines and a set of pre-defined packages (containing pre-defined routines for modeling functionality and timing) to facilitate the acceleration of designs which use cells from a VITAL library. The VITAL Level-I guidelines constrain the modeling capabilities provided by VHDL in order to facilitate higher performance (Figure I). Accumulating "gains" Constrained "flexibility" Higher performance & Increased...

Object-oriented techniques and languages have been proven to significantly increase engineering efficiency in software development. Many benefits are expected from their introduction into electronic modeling. Among them are better support for model reusability and flexibility, more efficient system modeling, and more possibilities in design space exploration and prototyping. Object-Oriented Modeling explores the latest techniques in object-oriented methods, formalisms and hardware description language extensions.
The seven chapters comprising this book provide an overview of...

Models in system design follow the general tendency in electronics in terms of size, complexity and difficulty of maintenance. While a model should be a manageable representation of a system, this increasing complexity sometimes forces current CAD-tool designers and model writers to apply modeling techniques to the model itself. Model writers are interested in instrumenting their model, so as to extract critical information before the model is complete. CAD tools designers use internal representations of the design at various stages. The complexity has also led CAD-tool developers to develop...

Modeling in Analog Design highlights some of the most pressing issues in the use of modeling techniques for design of analogue circuits. Using models for circuit design gives designers the power to express directly the behaviour of parts of a circuit in addition to using other pre-defined components. There are numerous advantages to this new category of analog behavioral language. In the short term, by favouring the top-down design and raising the level of description abstraction, this approach provides greater freedom of implementation and a higher degree of technology independence....

Models in System Design tracks the general trend in electronics in terms of size, complexity and difficulty of maintenance. System design is by nature combined with prototyping, mixed domain design, and verification, and it is no surprise that today's modeling and models are used in various levels of system design and verification. In order to deal with constraints induced by volume and complexity, new methods and techniques have been defined. Models in System Design provides an overview of the latest modeling techniques for use by system designers.
The first part of...