TTL: a modular language for hardware/software systems design

The development of tools for the design of both hardware and software systems draws great benefits from the use of formal methods, especially if they offer a descriptive capacity which covers real applications. On the basis of the T-LOTOS language, a language called TTL has been developed, which adds new constructs and tools to the high expressiveness of the original language, thus making it suitable for the specification of hardware and software systems of real complexity. Some of the extension proposed and presented cover the aspects of modularization of the specification, the introduction of an iterative construct and a first move to object paradigma. An extensive example of the use of TTL is presented to show its characteristics. The features of TTL have been widely tested in the development of a framework for codesign. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science (USA). All rights reserved.