A number of techniques and software tools for embedded system design have been recently proposed. However, the current practice in the designer community is heavily based on manual techniques and on past experience rather than on a rigorous approach to design. To advance the state of the art it is important to address a number of relevant design problems and solve them to demonstrate the power of the new approaches. We chose an industrial example in automotiveelectronics to validate our design methodology: an existingcommercially availableEngine Control Unit. We discuss in detail the speci cation, the implementation philosophy, and the architectural trade-o analysis. We analyze the results obtained with our approach and compare them with the existing design underlining the advantages o ered by a systematic approach to embedded system design in terms of performance and design time.
Alberto L. Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, Antonino Damia