Fast prototyping of real time systems: A new challenge?

As electronic systems become more complex and gather more and more functionality, the attention of the design automation community is gradually drifting away from the chip prototyping problem and starts to focus on the development of system design technology. One might wonder how system prototyping differs from the traditional chip design problem. The author demonstrate that there are indeed some fundamental differences, which will effect the design methodology at both the specification, simulation and implementation levels. On the other hand, the authors also argues that a large part of the chip design methodology is valuable at the system level as well