Design refinement for the development of an audio dynamic range controller

A fundamental issue in the development of a modern electronic design is represented by productivity: the complexity of digital systems is growing so fast that a lot of resources are required for meaningful and efficient design, guaranteeing a feasible time-to-market. Abstraction is an important tool to manage complexity, because it allows to catch the essence of an object, giving less importance to other properties, avoiding premature introduction of implementation details. For this reason it is important to adopt a methodology that can lead to the desired functionality through the creation of high-level executable models that can be easily refined and adapted to the subsequent stages of hardware and software synthesis. In this paper, this methodology is applied in the development of an audio dynamic range compressor designed for the creation of an electronic musical keyboard.