A concept for design of embedded systems at semantic level

The paper proposes a concept that aims at putting the design of embedded systems at a new, higher level of abstraction. Until now, there is a gap of several weeks of modeling efforts between an initial block diagram sketched on a blackboard and first executable models for e.g. architecture exploration and virtual prototyping. Being able to simulate during or short after initial discussions would be of great benefit. The idea is to provide a library of "smart" models that fill missing details by context knowledge represented in ontologies. In particular, communication between software and peripheral units is replaced by (semantic) references to ontologies. The library is partially implemented based on SystemC (TLM, AMS) and work in progress. For demonstration, a model of an electronic throttle control is modeled at semantic level.