Metamodeling: What is it good for?

The past decade has seen a penchant for abstraction in hardware design. Papers and books have proliferated about how to elevate hardware design entry beyond HDLs. Various languages, transactional concepts, tools for synthesis, equivalence checking, and so forth have been brought to the market. Despite so much progress with design aids, another important way of enhancing design productivity was unintentionally sidelined. "Reuse" in the form of IP modules was a sideshow to electronic system-level (ESL) tools. It\´s not that IP reuse was not promoted at all, but that it was done in ways unconnected to this excitement around ESL. IP companies came to the market, and industrial consortia such as the Virtual Socket Interface Alliance arose to standardize IP interfaces, on-chip bus protocols, and collateral to be delivered along with IP modules.