Multilevel design and verification of hardware/software systems

It is pointed out that most real systems in information technology are based on cooperating hardware and software, and the hardware is more than a single chip. System design can be viewed as a massively multidimensional optimization problem for which the solution set is only partially known. Experimental exploration of the design space is the only available approach. A number of projects carried out at Lund University demonstrate that a dramatic increase in system performance and design productivity can be gained. The approach includes a new attitude to the design process, a new role for the designer, new design methodology, and new concepts. It has been shown that, by making extensive use of modern tools, the designer can develop and evaluate a set of hierarchical functional models of the entire system during the design process and establish well-defined relationships between the models