An efficient hardware design approach from system-level specification

This paper presents a new system-level design approach from specification and description language (SDL). SDL is a standardized language for system-level specification which is widely used for specifying the real-time system, e.g., telecommunication systems. In order to derive the final hardware design, a set of mapping rules from SDL symbols to VHDL descriptions is studied and proposed. Our approach allows us to initially input the graphical SDL specification, and to finally obtain the correct hardware design described by VHDL. A system specification for the vending machine is illustrated and designed successfully by this approach.