| As embedded systems become more complex, there is an increasing demand for development techniques and tools to manage the complexity. Experiences from the software engineering industry have shown that diagram-based modeling techniques are useful in providing a means to represent abstract concepts of a system that can eventually be refined, in a stepwise fashion, to obtain more detailed design descriptions. Currently, a hardware description language is the most abstract representation commonly used to model embedded systems. The potential disadvantage of using a hardware description language at the beginning of the design process is that implementation decisions can be introduced before requirements are understood clearly.; The objective of this thesis is twofold. First, the thesis introduces an object-oriented modeling framework for requirements analysis and design of embedded systems, including a stepwise refinement process. The second objective is to provide a mapping between the graphical, object-oriented models and VHDL. Given the wide-range of tool support, VHDL can then be used to check the consistency of the diagrams and can be used to simulate the behavior of the system to ensure a clear understanding of requirements prior to introducing implementation details. |
