ECL: A Specification Environment for System-Level Design

Abstract

We propose a new specification environment for system-level design called ECL. It combines the Esterel and C languages to provide a more versatile means for specifying heterogeneous designs. It can be viewed as the addition to C of explicit constructs from Esterel for concurrency and pre-emption, and thus makes these operations easier to specify and more apparent. An ECL specification is compiled into a reactive part (an extended finite state machine representing most of the ECL program), and a pure data looping part. The first can be robustly estimated and synthesized to hardware or software, while the second is implemented in software as specified. ECL is a good candidate for specification of new behavior in system-level design tools such as Cadence's Cierto VCC tool [l]. ECL is especially targeted for specification of control protocols between data-computing behavioral blocks.