Controlling the design and development cycle

This chapter focuses on the need to control and guide design flows to achieve efficient application implementations. The chapter highlights the importance of starting and dealing with high abstraction levels when developing embedded computing applications. The MATLAB language is used to illustrate typical development processes, especially when high levels of abstraction are used in a first stage of development. In such cases, there is the need to translate these models to programming languages with efficient toolchain support to target common embedded computer architectures. The chapter briefly addresses the mapping problem and highlights the importance of hardware/software partitioning as a prime task to optimize computations on a heterogeneous platform consisting of hardware and software components. We motivate for the need of domain-specific languages (DSLs) and productivity tools to deal with code maintenance complexity when targeting multiple and heterogeneous architectures. We also introduce LARA, an aspect-oriented DSL used throughout the remaining chapters to describe design flow strategies and to provide executable specifications for examples requiring code instrumentation and compiler transformations.