Interactive system design in ESCAPE

This paper presents the ESCAPE design environment. ESCAPE is able to capture different design descriptions and to validate these descriptions through simulation. It is oriented towards hardware design and validation, although it can be used to model and validate other abstract models as well. ESCAPE basically consists of a very flexible tool to capture and to display design data and an integrated interactive simulator. Incremental updates of data structure, direct presentation of simulation results and the usage of animation make ESCAPE very useful for prototyping: it allows a very fast exploration of the design space and it is an excellent debugging tool