Requirements for specification of embedded systems

With the increasing acceptance of automation of the lower-level design tasks, designers are increasingly focusing their efforts at the more abstract stages of the system-design process. In this paper, we examine some of the issues related to specification of embedded systems. We first introduce the notion of a conceptual model as being the first step of system specification. We demonstrate the need to have a one-to-one correspondence between the conceptual model and the specification language used to describe the system´s functionality. We then present some of the salient characteristics of embedded systems. Finally, we evaluate the capabilities of several well-known hardware description languages-VHDL, Verilog, HardwareC, SDL (Specification and Description Language), Statecharts, Spec-Charts, and CSP (Communicating Sequential Processes)-with respect to specifying embedded systems