An efficient design methodology for hybrid avionic test systems

Due to the growing computation rates of avionic test systems, using hybrid CPU/FPGA architectures becomes an interesting solution to meet the performance goals. To overcome the development complexity of these systems, using system level design tools is considered a vital premise. At this level, extremely challenging requirements are needed such as the appropriate programming model and the rapid system prototyping. Focusing these issues, this paper proposes first the usage of heterogeneous architectures to design innovative avionic test systems. Second, a Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) approach is explored to be used as an efficient design methodology for the target systems. Within this approach, the compilation is defined as a sequence of small and maintainable transformations, that allows to move gradually from a high-level description into models closer to the final implementation.