On Model-Driven Engineering of Reconfigurable Digital Control Hardware Systems
Tomás Balderas-Contreras, Gustavo Rodríguez‐Gómez, René Cumplido · IGI Global eBooks · 2011
The continuous increase in the degree of design complexity during the development process of modern digital hardware systems, come into being due to the increasing demand of more and more functionality under strict design constraints, has led to designers trying to alleviate this complexity by increasing the level of abstraction when describing the functionality of a system. Recent proposals in the field of Electronic Design Automation intend to use common programming languages, like C, C++, and Java, or dialects derived from them, to describe the behavior of a digital hardware system and then generate a lower-level representation, closer to the hardware implementation platform, from such description. This phenomenon led us to firmly believe that the process of describing the functionality of a digital circuit resembles more and more the process of developing software; and, thus, it is possible to experiment with the application of the latest trends in software engineering, like the Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) paradigm, to design digital hardware systems. In this chapter we describe the basic principles of MDE, and provide some hints about the kind of languages and transformation tools needed to design algorithms in the domain of digital control that could be transformed into a digital circuit. We intend to open doors and encourage the research on the design of digital control systems at higher levels of abstraction and their implementations in different kinds of hardware platforms, including reconfigurable devices.