A Component-Based Design Environment for ESL Design

In this article, we present Gezel, a component-based, electronic system-level (ESL) design environment for heterogeneous designs. Gezel consists of a simple but extendable hardware description language (HDL) and an extensible simulation-and-refinement kernel. Our approach is to create a system by designing, integrating, and programming a set of programmable components. These components can be processor models or hard ware simulation kernels. Using Gezel, designers can clearly distinguish between component design, plat form integration, and platform programming, thus separating the roles of component builder, platform builder, and platform user. Embedded applications have driven the development of this ESL design environment. To demonstrate the broad scope of our component-based approach, we discuss three applications that use our environment; all are from the field of embedded security