Reasoning about the Trends and Challenges of Engineering Design Automation

In this paper, the author discusses the raising level of abstraction when designing chips and dealing with electronics system design and in particular, embedded system design. In this framework, the term system-level design for an integrated circuit relates to any level of abstraction that is "above" RTL and the term embedded systems refers to the electronic components of a wide variety of personal or societal devices, e.g., a mechanical system such as an automobile, a train, a plane, an electrical system such as an electrical motor or generator, a chemical system such as a distillation plant, a health-care equipment such as a pace-maker