Design automation tools and methodologies always encounter a problem
of how systems may be designed efficiently which includes static modeling
and dynamic manipulation of system parts. With the rapid progress of
design technology, the continuously increasing number of different choices
per system part and the growing complexity of today's systems, the
efficiency of the design environment is not only a major concern now, but
will also be a demanding problem in the recent future. In contrast to
heuristic methods, a novel environment called POSE is proposed that
increases efficiency during design without losing optimality in the final
design results. System parts are modeled using the popular object-oriented
modeling technique and are dynamically manipulated using the parallel
design technique. A complete integration of object-oriented and parallel
techniques is one of the major features of POSE. Common problems related
to parallel design such as emptiness and deadlock are also
elegantly solved within POSE. Experimental results and formal analysis
based on POSE all show its practical and theoretical usefulness. POSE
can be used at any level of synthesis as long as off-the-shelf
building-blocks manipulation is required. POSE can be applied especially to
system-level synthesis, whose targets can be parallel computer
architectures, systems-on-chip, or embedded systems. We will show how POSE
has been applied to ICOS, a recently proposed synthesis methodology.
Furthermore, POSE can be easily integrated with other heuristic design
methodologies to allow increased design efficiency.