A model driven development approach for implementing reactive systems in hardware

To deal with the increasing complexity of digital systems, the model driven development approach has proven to be beneficial. This paper presents a model driven hardware design process that is dedicated to reactive embedded systems. The approach is based on the component language (COLA), a synchronous data flow language with formal semantics. COLA follows the hypothesis of perfect synchrony. Models thus do not assume specific timing properties and remain deterministic as long as data flow requirements are retained. This is an essential feature for modeling safety-critical systems. Further, the well-defined semantics not only allows that the resulting models can be formally reasoned about, but is also the key to translation to domain-specific languages. This paper describes the approach of translating the models to VHDL descriptions from their graphical representations. As COLA is well-adapted to both data flow description and control automata, the generated VHDL code can be synthesized to very efficient FPGA circuits, comparable to that synthesized from hand-written VHDL code according to our case study.