2. System design

2.1 Interest

For many years, researchers and industrialists have focused on the problems of design and representation at the physical, circuit and logic levels of the basic elements of integrated circuits (transistors, logic gates), which constitute the lowest levels of abstraction. Computer-aided design tools (logic simulators, synthesis tools) have been developed jointly since the late 1980s, and are now an integral part of the circuit design process.

However, applications have become highly complex, and economic constraints are such that time-to-market is increasingly short, and product lifetimes are also very limited. Researchers and industrialists are now working at a higher level of abstraction, called system levels, to free themselves from implementation...