TABLE OF CONTENTS Increasingly, there is aneed to develop more complex digital systems and more quickly to reduce development time and cost and to get a new product to market first. These requirements have highlighted the limitations that exist with traditional design approaches that were developed and suited to smaller designs where working at a more detailed level was part of the normal design process. In the more complex designs, working at the detailed design level is no longer viable, resulting in a need to work at a higher level of design abstraction. Here, the designer develops, validates, and verifies the operation of high-level design models, which are then automatically synthesized into the circuit design implementation. The designer can concentrate on getting the high-level operation right, then put the detailed implementation into the hands of software electronic design automation (EDA) tools [1] for automating the creation of the design details essentially the synthesis of the system-level models into registered transfer logic (RTL) code (for hardware) and/or software source code (such as C/C++). Then the standard RTL logic synthesis design flow to utilize this RTL code is undertaken for the hardware, and source code compilation is undertaken for the software.
An electronic system-level design approach considers both hardware and software and the right mix of hardware and software. Much of the system-level and detailed design implementation work is undertaken using one or more EDA tools.
The implementation technologies available for use today processor based, FPGA (field programmable gate array) or CPLD (complex programmable logic...
