9. Conclusion

Input methods for design tools have remained largely unchanged for many years. Hardware description languages first appeared in 1984 with MATLAB and MAST, but were not generalized to electronics until the appearance of VHDL (87), VHDL-AMS (99), VERILOG-AMS or MODELICA. They offer designers a much richer means of expression. Despite these powerful tools, even with the help of modern project managers, the description in schematic form of the various design levels, integrating blocks described with these languages, remains limited in accessible semantics and flexibility of management and manipulation.

We have defined the notion of meta-schema and shown that this more abstract approach allows complex notions to be handled within a multi-designer, multi-discipline project team, or even within the extended enterprise.

This notion is easily implemented...