High-level Design of Composite Systems

Composite systems, encompassing soft-computing and conventional processing modules, are attractive approaches to tackle complex applications, especially those requiring adaptability and generalization abilities. This chapter presents an innovative high-level design methodology that provides a comprehensive framework to achieve the most efficient and effective solutions. The system is first specified at a high-abstraction level by using description languages suited to capture the system behavior and the other non-functional constraints. In the computational paradigm co-design the system description is then partitioned into modules, described with various computational paradigms, and modules are completely configured. The result is an algorithmic description of the whole system, from which conventional hardware/software co-design techniques can derive the final implementation.