Building Heterogeneous Functional Prototypes Using Articulated Interfaces

A functional prototype is an executable specification of an integrated system that can be used for early validation and verification. This prototype is assembled and verified using a variety of languages at different levels of abstraction. In order to preserve the integrity and executability of this heterogeneous specification, an articulated interface mechanism is presented. The appropriate decoupling of the interface provides an efficient and reusable communication component that can be used for both design refinement and verification. Experimentation shows that different parts of the model can be refined individually and exported to a target platform without compromising the prototype integrity. A verification environment is also proposed to perform unit verification in a heterogeneous environment