This report contains transparencies of a presentation on the design process in the University of California Irvine's Behavioral-Synthesis Environment. The human-interface aspects of the environment are discussed in detail and several design-process examples are given to demonstrate the power and usefulness of this environment for behavioral synthesis.

Due to recent increases in chip complexity, behavioral synthesis has become an important area of research and company interest. However, there has been market resistance to the automatic behavioral synthesis approach for two reasons. It often produces results inferior to manual designs, and it allows only minimal user control. To overcome these hurdles, we present a design methodology for human interaction in design synthesis, which, in contrast to the automatic synthesis approach, gives the human designer fine-grain control over synthesis tasks, and continually supplies feedback in the form of quality measures so that the user can make informed design-related decisions. To confirm the feasibility of the proposed design methodology and to demonstrate its power and flexibility, we also present the Interactive Synthesis Environment (ISE), a working software environment comprising design views, quality measure feedback, and synthesis algorithms.

In this report, we describe the specify-explore-refine (SER) co-design methodology for design of embedded systems. We describe the necessary design steps in order to map an abstract specification of the system to the final implementation model. We propose a co-design tool based on our co-design methodology. We also present a graphical user interface for the proposed co-design tool.