High-Level Reconfigurable Embedded System Design Based on Heterogeneous Models of Computation

One of the main challenges of embedded system design lies in the natural heterogeneity of these systems. We can say that embedded systems are electronic systems designed and programmed to tackle a specific application. Each application has its requirements, although embedded systems often combine many domain-specific subsystems. Considering this context, the design of embedded systems can be extremely challenging, including system modeling, simulation, formal verification, and the synthesis to a correct implementation. To manage the complexity of such systems, the design should start at higher levels of abstraction, based on formal models, without considering the low-level characteristics of the underlying software or hardware. These high-level formal meta-models, named models of computation (MoC), define a set of rules that dictate how computation should be performed and how they should communicate with each other, along with other information such as the notion of time. In this paper, we present as the main contribution a set of rules and interfaces that enable the proper mixing of different MoC domains in a framework for complex embedded system design, thus allowing a heterogeneous system composition at a high abstraction level, including the synchronous reactive, synchronous dataflow, and scenario-aware dataflow MoCs. We model both part of an avionic system and a reconfigurable RISC-V processor using these MoCs and the proposed interfaces as a case study showing the applicability brought by our proposal.