Heterogeneous system-level specification in SystemC

A specification methodology for embedded system design should provide a capacity for heterogeneous specification. This would give the designer an effective tool to build a specification with different expressiveness needs, required by the multidisciplinary character of embedded systems, which, in turn, is due to their wide range of applications and an increasing integration capability. This specification methodology should be suitable for design tasks in order to improve design productivity. In this context, this paper deals with the general solution of the system-level heterogeneous specification in the framework of a specification methodology based on SystemC. This specification methodology is suitable for system-level modeling, but also for design procedures such as system-level profiling and single-source generation. Specifically, we study and propose a solution for a system-level SystemC specification which combines several untimed models of computations, (MoCs), namely CSP, PN and KPN. In order to situate clearly the heterogeneous specification methodology we will use a general study framework called Rugby metamodel.