A Functional Specification Notation for Co-Design of Mixed Analog-Digital Systems

This paper discusses aBlox - a specification notation for high-level synthesis of mixed-signal systems. aBlox addresses three importantaspects of mixed-signal system specification: (1) description of functionality and (2) performance issues and (3) expression of analog-digital interactions. The semantics of aBlox embeds concepts and rules of a functional computational model, and uses a declarative style to denote performance elements. The paper shows some mixed-signal specifications that we developed in aBlox. Finally, we describe a high-level analog synthesis experiment that used aBlox specifications as inputs