High-Level Specification of Behavioural Hardware Models with MODES

The ever increasing complexity of digital hardware, forces the hardware designer to switch from a low-level capture-andsimulation process to a high-level design-and-synthesis process. In order to assist the designer during the specification phase, we designed MODES, a new high-level specification environment. MODES integrates graphical specification capture in various behavioural representations, a facility to merge various specification formats, a high-level simulation tool and, finally, code generation for simulation and synthesis, e.g. in VHDL-1076, IEEE's hardware description language. Furthermore, some verification and consistency-check mechanisms have been integrated.