FDL is the European forum to exchange experiences and learn new trends in the application of languages and their associated design methods and tools for the design of electronic systems. The Forum is organized around Thematic Areas (TA) (described below) and includes working sessions, poster sessions, embedded tutorials, panels and technical discussions. Fringe meetings such as user group or standardization meetings are also held in conjunction with the Forum.


{ The Thematic Areas}

FPD TA: Formalisms for Property-Driven Design
Chair: Dominique Borrione – TIMA Laboratory, France, Dominique.Borrione@imag.fr

The assertion of properties is essential to a variety of design tasks: verification of functional behaviour, generation of test stimuli, synthesis of observation monitors and on-line tests, model checking on the reachable state space, direct synthesis from assertions, etc. Standardized formalisms such as PSL, SystemVerilog, with trace operational semantics, are widely used primarily at synthesizable RTL; their application to more abstract design levels and to mixed system designs becomes relevant. Other formalisms such as DE2 or B provide a “correct by construction” top-down design methodology supported by proven refinements. Some efforts aim at defining mathematical semantics and formal processing of time-dependant properties and specifications using more intuitive, human-friendly, graphical syntax. FPD welcomes research contributions, tool demonstrations, reports on standardization activities,in all aspects of innovative property expression and processing as well as experiments in comparing the effectiveness of the various formalisms and related tools in real designs.


CSD TA: C/C++-Based System Design
Chair: Frank Oppenheimer – Kuratorium OFFIS e.V., Germany, frank.oppenheimer@offis.de

C/C++ based hardware/software system design methodologies are entering standard industrial design flows. While SystemC is gaining acceptance for system-level specification and design, Verilog and VHDL are being extended in order to improve their system-level capabilities. This thematic area addresses language-based hardware/software system design and tools for modelling, simulating, evaluating the performance,and analyzing hardware/software systems. Topics in CSD also include RTOS and embedded software aspects; IP based design, requirements to system design, industrial case studies, interoperability among modelling languages, heterogeneous models of computations; hardware, softwareand HW/SW interface synthesis, and roadmaps for the future development of existing approaches.


AMS TA: Analog, Mixed-Signal and Heterogeneous System Design
Chair: Christoph Grimm – University of Hannover, Germany, grimm@ims.uni-hannover.de

Many systems combine analog, RF, power electronic, or even non-electrical components with digital hardware and an increasing share of software. The combination and tight interaction of such components is a challenge: Specification, modelling, simulation, (symbolic) analysis, verification, design, (virtual) prototyping or even synthesis of analog, mixed-signal and heterogeneous systems are complex issues. Furthermore, physical effects are gaining importance and have to be considered at system level. Languages, models, representations and tools such as VHDL-AMS, Verilog-AMS, SystemC-AMS, Modelica, Matlab/Simulink, or Hybrid Automata and are emerging to support such issues from analog circuit design up to system level. The AMS thematic area aims at presenting research activities, design experiences, and standardization activities related to these topics.


UML TA: UML-Based System Specification & Design
Chair: Piet van der Putten – TU Eindhoven, The Netherlands, p.h.a.v.d.putten@tue.nl

The Unified Modeling Language supports semi-formal methods for system-level design of complex embedded systems including highly programmable (HW) platforms and heterogeneous Systems-on-Chip. Current methods do not close the gap from specification to (automatic) synthesis yet. UML related research topics in this field are Executable UML, Model Driven Development (MDA, PIM, PSM); design transformations; UML semantics; metamodels (e.g., for SystemC and other System Description Languages or HDLs); UML profiles; formalisation of UML towards domain specific languages for simulation and synthesis. Other topics welcomed are standardisation work; Real-time UML; UML related techniques for performance analysis, validation, and verification; SDL; OCL; XMI; practical design experiences with UML2.