Abstract
Embedded system designers, in varied industry segments that include consumer electronics, automotive control, and medical equipment, are facing increased pressure to create products quickly and inexpensively. Moreover, they must create product families that offer customers a wide-range of cost, function, and performance tradeoffs. Another trend is the increasing level of integration, performance, and programmability achievable in off-the-shelf integrated circuits including microprocessors, programmable logic, and devices such as LCDs, network interface controllers, and speech generators. Designers find using these devices to be advantageous because of their low cost and the way they facilitate rapid realization of designs not only for prototyping but for production as well. In fact, with embedded controllers now found in everything from automobiles to smart credit cards, many products have declining lifetimes that make custom integrated circuits a less economically viable option. Thus, the coupling of these two trends is leading to new dominant issues in embedded system design: rapid integration of new components and portability of design specifications to more than one realization. Rapid integration is needed to take advantage of emerging devices (processors, sensors, actuators), re-design of portions of existing designs, and to support rapid prototyping. Portability is needed to keep up with continually shifting technology as well as the development of product families. Ideally, a single description of design functionality should have a long lifetime and be realized in a myriad different ways.