Esterel and Java in an object-oriented modelling and simulation framework for heterogeneous software and hardware systems. The SEP approach

The size of today´s digital systems is increasing very quickly. So design tools have to allow the maximum reusability and an adapted level of description depending on our goals during each part of the design cycle. Moreover, systems require more and more heterogeneous competency domain. Then we have to be able to manage the integration of complex and heterogeneous software and hardware systems. In some previous articles (F. Mallet et al., 1998), we presented an object oriented method and the related tool, which were demonstrated to be useful in order to model and simulate hardware digital architectures and their software applications in order to obtain performance estimations. The paper firstly intends to show the ease of integration into our framework of some capabilities to describe parts of system behaviour with other formalisms. Indeed, due to the description power of our generic object oriented model and without any modification, we managed to take care of components, the behaviour of which is described using the synchronous reactive language Esterel. Secondly, we illustrate the use of our new extensions to efficiently model an automatic control system for a sprinkler