1.2. Embedded System Environment

Figure 1-1. ES Environment

ESE consists of a Front-End and a Back-End supported by two interfaces as shown in Section 1.2. The Front-End consists of System Capture, which is a GUI for capturing the definition of the platform architecture and product application code. Platform Development tool generates timed TLMs of the platform architecture executing the product application defined by the capture tool. These timed TLMs provide reliable performance metrics and are used for early exploration of design choices. In the Back-End, the HW Development component is used to generate cycle-accurate or RTL description of the HW components which can be further refined by commercially available tools for Application-Specific Integrated Cuircuit (ASIC) or Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) manufacturing. SW Development generate firmware necessary to run communication and application SW on the platform. Validation User Interface is used to debug and validate developed SW and HW. Decision User Interface is used by the designer, to estimate the quality metrics and make decisions such as component selection, task scheduling, mapping of SW functions to HW components and others.