models are important tools to manage the increasing complexity of system design. The choice of a modeling language for constructing models governs what types of systems can be modeled, and which subsequent design activities can be performed. This is especially true for the area of embedded electronic and cyber-physical system design, which poses several challenging requirements of modeling and design methodologies. This article argues that the Formal System Design (ForSyDe) methodology with the necessary presented extensions fulfills these requirements, and thus qualifies for the design of tomorrow’s systems. Based on the theory of models of computation and the concept of process constructors, heterogeneous models are captured in ForSyDe with formal semantics. A refined layer of the formalism is introduced to make its denotational-style semantics easy to implement on top of commonly used imperative languages, and an open-source realization on top of the IEEE standard language SystemC is presented. The introspection mechanism is introduced to automatically export an intermediate representation of the constructed models for further analysis/synthesis by external tools. Flexibility and extensibility of ForSyDe is emphasized by integrating a new timed model of computation without central synchronization, and by providing mechanisms for integrating foreign models, parallel and distributed simulation, modeling adaptive, data-parallel, and non-deterministic systems. A set of ForSyDe features is demonstrated in practice, and compared with similar approaches using a running example and two relevant case studies.

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New design methodologies and modeling frameworks are required to provide a solution for integrating legacy code and IP models in order to be accepted in the industry. To tackle this problem, we introduce the concept of wrappers in the context of a formal heterogeneous embedded system modeling framework. The formalism is based on the language-independent concept of models of computation. Wrappers enable the framework to co-simulate/co-execute with external models which might be legacy code, an IP block, or an implementation of a partially refined system. They are defined formally in order to keep the analyzability of the original framework and also enable automations such as generation of model wrappers and co-simulation interfaces. As a proof of concept, three wrappers for models in different abstraction levels are introduced and implemented for two case studies.© 2011 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.QC 2011020

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