Abstract

Advances in microelectronics allow the integration of more and more functionality on a single chip. Emerging system-on-a-chip architectures include a large amount of heterogeneous components and are of increasing complexity. Applications using these architectures require many low-level details in order to yield an efficient implementation. On the other hand constant time-to-market pressure on electronic systems demands a short design process that allows to model a system at a high abstraction level, not taking low-level implementation details into account. Clearly there is a significant abstraction gap between an ideal model for specification and another one for implementation. This abstraction gap has to be addressed by methodologies for electronic system design. This thesis presents the ForSyDe (Formal System Design) methodology, which has been developed with the objective to move system design to a higher level of abstraction and to bridge the abstraction gap by transformational design refinement. ForSyDe is based on carefully selected formal foundations. The initial

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