A specification-driven architectural design environment

We introduce an environment we've developed that helps designers represent, model, and explore design tradeoffs at the architectural abstraction level and synthesize designs at the behavioral level. The Design Analysis and Synthesis Environment (DASE) accomplishes this by supporting design capture, design space exploration, and validation for the final design synthesis. DASE specifically caters to design capture via the Design Specification Language (DSL) description, exploration through simulation, and behavioral synthesis through a translator that produces VHDL output for behavior synthesis. DASE has a support library for telecommunication systems, although DASE's library support system can he reconfigured for other domains. We illustrate the various capabilities of DASE, such as specification capture, design exploration, software and hardware modeling, and synthesis. We discuss models based on Petri nets, summarize other DASE designs, and present results reflecting synthesized code sizes-the resulting executable descriptions of the hardware and software.<
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