Requirements for specification of embedded systems

With the increasing acceptance of automation of the lower-level design tasks, designers are increasingly focusing their efforts at the more abstract stages of the system-design process. In this paper, we examine some of the issues related to specification of embedded systems. We first introduce the notion of a conceptual model as being the first step of system specification. We demonstrate the need to have a one-to-one correspondence between the conceptual model and the specification language used to describe the system's functionality. We then present some of the salient characteristics of embedded systems. Finally, we evaluate the capabilities of several well-known hardware description languages-VHDL, Verilog, HardwareC, SDL (Specification and Description Language), Statecharts, Spec-Charts, and CSP (Communicating Sequential Processes)-with respect to specifying embedded systems.