DASE: An Environment for System Level Telecommunication Design Exploration and Modelling

摘要

Design automation (DA) has steadily contributed to improvements witnessed in the system design process. Initial applications were to address low level design concerns such as transistor layout; however the focus of tools has slowly progressed up the design abstraction scale. The current state-of-the-art provides solutions for synthesis issues at the register-transfer (high level) and lower levels. While DA has helped in reducing design timelines and re-design, a major source of design difficulties are just recently being addressed and promise to be the next wave in DA applicability. The problems arise within the architectural (or system) level of abstraction very early in the design cycle. They may be classified as those related to design specification and design capture. The former is a complex prblem area and significant work has been accomplished in attempting to formalize specifications for modelling [1]. The latter, a relatively new research area that attompts to bridge the design process gap between specification and design, is the focus of this paper.