Specification and Design Methodology for Real-Time Embedded Systems

The process of designing large real-time embedded signal processing systems is plagued by a lack of coherent specification and design methodology. A canonical waterfall design process is commonly used to specify, design, and implement these systems with commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) multiprocessing (MP) hardware and software. Powerful frameworks exist for each individual phase of this canonical design process, but no single methodology exists which enables these frameworks to work together coherently, i.e., allowing the output of a framework used in one phase to be consumed by a different framework used in the next phase. This lack of coherence usually leads to design errors that are not caught until well in to the implementation phase. Since the cost of redesign increases as the design moves through these three stages, redesign is the most expensive if not performed until the implementation phase, thus making the current incoherent methodology costly. Specification and Design Methodology for Real-Time Embedded Systems shows how designs targeting COTS MP technologies can be improved by providing a coherent coupling between these frameworks, a quality known as "model continuity. This book presents a new specification and design methodology (SDM) which accomplishes the requirements specification, design exploration, and implementation of COTS MP-based signal processing systems by using powerful commercial frameworks that are intelligently integrated into a single domain-specific SDM. From the foreword: "This book is remarkably practical. It provides an excellent snapshot of the state-of-the-art and gives the reader a good understanding of both the fundamental challenges of specification and design as well as a unified and quantified ability to assess a given methodology". Daniel Gajski, University of California