Model driven design of heterogeneous synchronous embedded systems

Abstract

Synchronous embedded systems are becoming more and more complicated and are usually implemented with integrated hardware/software solutions. This implementation manner brings new challenges to the traditional model-driven design environments such as SCADE and STATEMATE, that supports pure hardware or software design. In this paper, we propose a co-design tool Tsmart-Edola to facilitate the system developers, and automatically generate the executable VHDL code and C code from the for- mal verified SyncBlock computation model. SyncBlock is a lightweight high-level system specification model with well defined syntax, simulation and formal semantics. Based on which, the graphical model editor, graphical simulator, verification translator, and code generator are implemented and seamlessly integrated into the Tsmart-Edola. For evaluation, we apply Tsmart-Edola to the design of a real-world train controller based on the international standard IEC 61375. Several critical ambiguousness or bugs in the standard are detected during formal verification of the constructed system model. Furthermore, the generated VHDL code and C code of Tsmart-Edola outperform that of the state-of-the-art tools in terms of synthesized gate array resource consumption and binary code size.