Executable Specifications

The past 10 years have seen important advances in system-level modeling. We can now create high-performance, timing-accurate, complete system models that do more than just mimic hardware architecture – they can actually define the architecture as a virtual system prototype.

The VSP is derived from a product’s business and functional requirements, as Figure 1 shows. Using system-level design tools, system architects can produce accurate facsimiles of the hardware and software – a mixture of actual code (the operating system, for instance) and skeleton code (applications and middleware databases). This executable system specification, or VSP, can then serve as a golden reference model, driving concurrent hardware-software development and supporting hardware and software optimization for complex control tasks. Creating an optimal VSP requires a quantitative methodology capable of feeding candidate VSPs into test regimes that run extensive software workloads and measure the results. System architects analyze the results and incrementally improve the next iteration by, among other changes, systematically varying architectural parameters that partly characterize the VSP. This process determines an optimal hardware-software architecture, or family of architectures, destined to just meet a new product’s market requirements. The process relies on VSPs that are functionally complete, inherently timing accurate, and capable of software execution performance greater than 10 MIPS. It can be partially automated by using the experimental design statistics to drive, for instance, the selection of the next VSP parameter set. The VSP executable specification leverages the engineering process when used to concurrently drive the hardware design and software development processes. With the concurrent development processes, evolving software can execute on all hardware models developed during hardware architecture and detailed design. Conversely, evolving hardware can be tested using any software developed during software architecture and detailed design. This turns the conventional development and verification/ validation process on its head: The systems-level test cases are generated as part of the VSP specification, then the architectural, module, and unit tests are generated from the top down, as hardware and software development progresses through the engineering process.

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