ISRN KTH/ESD/FOU--99/1--SE A SURVEY OF DESIGN TRANSFORMATION TECHNIQUES

As the digital hardware systems grow in complexity and size, the trend in system design has been to design at higher and higher levels of abstraction. Program transformation supports the idea of designing at a higher level of abstraction which implies describing the behavior of the required system and then transforming this into a structural and behavioral description at a low level, possibly in a hardware description language. Such kind of design methodology can reduce the overall design time and ensure the correctness of the implemented system. In this paper, recent progress in the transformational development of complex hardware and HW/SW co-design systems is reviewed. A brief review of the research activities in software design is also provided in the first part of this paper. 1