Title :
ECL: a specification environment for system-level design
Author :
Lavagno, Luciano ; Sentovich, Ellen
Author_Institution :
Cadence Berkeley Labs., CA, USA
Abstract :
We propose a new specification environment for system-level design called ECL. It combines the Esterel and C languages to provide a more versatile means for specifying heterogeneous designs. It can be viewed as the addition to C of explicit constructs from Esterel for waiting, concurrency and pre-emption, and thus makes these operations easier to specify and more apparent. An ECL specification is compiled into a reactive part (an extended finite state machine representing most of the ECL program), and a pure data looping part, thus nicely supporting a mix of control and data. The reactive part can be robustly estimated and synthesized to hardware or software, while the data looping part is implemented in software as specified
Keywords :
C language; embedded systems; finite state machines; formal specification; hardware-software codesign; C language; ECL; Esterel language; concurrency; data looping part; explicit constructs; extended finite state machine; heterogeneous designs; pure data looping; reactive part; specification environment; system-level design; Automata; Concurrent computing; Control system synthesis; Control systems; Embedded system; Hardware; Permission; Real time systems; Robustness; System-level design;
Conference_Titel :
Design Automation Conference, 1999. Proceedings. 36th
Conference_Location :
New Orleans, LA
Print_ISBN :
1-58113-092-9
DOI :
10.1109/DAC.1999.781369
