Abstract

Embedded systems present a tremendous opportunity to customize designs by exploiting the application behavior. Shrinking time-to-market, coupled with short product lifetimes create a critical need for rapid exploration and evaluation of candidate architectures. Architecture Description Languages (ADL) enable exploration of programmable architectures for a given set of application programs under various design con-straints such as area, power, and performance. The ADL is used to specify programmable embedded systems including processor, coprocessor and memory architectures. The ADL specification is used to generate a variety of software tools and models facilitating exploration and validation of candidate architectures. This chapter surveys the existing ADLs in terms of (a) the inherent features of the languages; and (b) the methodologies they support to enable simulation, compilation, synthesis, test generation, and validation of programmable embedded systems. It concludes with a discussion of relative merits and demerits of the existing ADLs, and expected features of future ADLs. 1

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