ABSTRACT
State-of-the-art Systems on Chip integrate more and more elaborate components such as processors and software, memory, logic, digital signal processors, and sensors. With this increasing complexity, there is a crucial need for new design methodologies. While moderatesize hardware components can still be developed and simulated at the Register Transfer (RT) level using languages, such as VHDL [8] and Verilog [7], the larger scale of more complex hardware/software products requires the Electronic System Level (ESL), see Figure 22.1.
