A platform-based taxonomy for ESL design

The purpose of this article is to paint the ESL design landscape by providing a unified framework for placing and analyzing existing and future tools in the context of an extensible design flow. This approach should help designers use tools more efficiently, clarify their flow’s entry and exit points, and highlight areas in the design process that could benefit from additional tools and support packages. This framework is based on platform-based design concepts. Using this framework, we’ve classified more than 90 different academic and industrial ESL offerings and partitioned the tool space into metaclasses that span an ideal design flow.