An EBD Approach to Embedded Product Design

In contrast to general-purpose computers, an embedded system has a special function for a special purpose. Nowadays, embedded products play an important role in daily life, and they are widely used almost everywhere, such as in GPS, mobile phones, digital TV, transportation systems, computer systems in aircraft, computer systems in vehicles. Despite its popularity, the development process for embedded products is usually very complicated and thus very often results in over time (development time), or in over-budget (cost) or a lack of expected product specifications. Therefore, it is necessary to use an appropriate prescriptive method or design methodology to guide a designer in the design process. The objective of the present thesis is to introduce a new approach to embedded system engineering to implement a new embedded product design. A rich working experience in industry suggests that there is a need for such work. Compared to the traditional approach, which uses product-based or process-based design analysis, the proposed approach uses environment-based design (EBD) methodology for the whole embedded system development life cycle, which may be a systematic procedure aimed to help designers during embedded product development. To better illustrate the application of the proposed design approach to embedded system engineering, an original example of an embedded ARM Linux system is used as a case study in the present thesis

A model-based approach for the specification and refinement of streaming applications

Embedded systems can be found in a wide range of applications. Depending on the application, embedded systems must meet a wide range of constraints. Thus, designing and programming embedded systems is a challenging task. Here, model-based design flows can be a solution. This thesis proposes novel approaches for the specification and refinement of streaming applications. To this end, it focuses on dataflow models. As key result, the proposed dataflow model provides for a seamless model-based design flow from system level to the instruction/logic level for a wide range of streaming applications

Formal Models for Communication-based Design

Concurrency is an essential element of abstract models for embedded systems. Correctness and efficiency of the design depend critically on the way concurrency is formalized and implemented. Concurrency is about communicating processes. We introduce an abstract formal way of representing communication among processes and we show how to refine this representation towards implementation. To this end, we present a formal model, Abstract Co-design Finite State Machines (ACFSM), and its refinement, Extended Co-design Finite State Machines (ECFSM), developed to capture abstract behavior of concurrent processes and derived from a model (Co-design Finite State Machine (CFSM)) we have used in POLIS, a system for the design and verification of embedded systems. The design of communication protocols is presented as an example of the use of these formal models