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ARTIST followup

Authors: Luca P. Carloni, Roberto Passerone, Alessandro
Pinto and Alberto L. Sangiovanni-Vincentelli

In this paper, we collected data on available languages, formalism and tools that have been proposed in the past years for the design and verification of hybrid systems. We review and compare these tools by highlighting their differences in the underlying semantics, expressive power and solution mechanisms. Table 1 lists tools and languages reviewed in this paper with information on the institution that supports the development of each project as well as pointers to the corresponding web site 1 and to some relevant publications.
The tools are covered in two main sections: one dedicated to simulationcentric tools including commercial offerings, one dedicated to formal verification-centric tools. The simulation-centric tools are the most popular among designers as they pose the least number of constraints on the systems to be analyzed. On the other hand, their semantics are too general to be amenable to formal analysis or synthesis. Tools based on restricted expressiveness of the description languages (see, for example, the synthesizable subset of RTL languages as a way of allowing tools to operate on a more formal way that may yield substantial productivity gains) do have an appeal as they may be the ones to provide the competitive edge in terms of quality of results and cost for obtaining them. The essence is to balance the gains in analysis and synthesis power versus the loss of expressive power.

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