Chapter 5 - ESL Flow

Abstract

This chapter introduces the electronic system-level (ESL) design flow. The ESL design flow may be divided into six steps that parallel the abstraction refinement composed of specification and modelling, pre-partitioning analysis, partitioning, post-partitioning analysis and debug, post-partitioning verification, hardware implementation, software implementation, and implementation verification. Although this chapter describes the ESL flow as a top-down flow, starting at specifications and ending up with implementations in hardware and software, this is an idealized concept that is rarely used in its strict form in real designs of real systems. Rather, design teams use combinations of bottom-up, top-down, and middle-out design flows. Writing specifications, and modelling, is the process of developing documents that describe system or product intent and constraints, and their translation into a variety of executable and declarative models. The product market requirements dictate the end-user functional and physical requirements of the product. The functional specification describes the functional requirements of the design from an opaque box perspective.