Co-Testing: Granting Testability in a Codesign Environment.

Hardware-software codesign is emerging as a global top-down solution to design of reactive embedded systems, starting from high level specifications and going — through hardware-software partitioning and cosynthesis — to link with lower level CAD and CASE tools. At the top level, requirements usually take into account cost and time bounds; we propose here to insert at the same level (i.e., before hardware-software partitioning) also testability requirements, so as to grant the possibility of checking correct interaction between the specified objects whatever their subsequent implementation. A formalism for definition of interfaces and protocols is presented; rules aimed at verification of the interface syntax are introduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]